


Those Who Can't...

by reylo_garbagecan



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Art Teacher Rey, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Chronic Pain, Creepy Snoke (Star Wars), Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fluff and Angst, History Teacher Ben Solo, Multi, Past Poe Dameron/Jessika Pava, Rey Needs A Hug, Rey-Centric, Snoke Being a Dick, basically the whole cast of the sequel trilogy, from creepy Snoke, rey palpatine? i don't know her, teacher rivalry, this will be angstier than a high school teacher au has any right to be, workplace harrassment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:07:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22868365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylo_garbagecan/pseuds/reylo_garbagecan
Summary: Mr. Solo leaned forward slightly and entwined his fingers together to fold on his stack of papers where the wood of his desk would have been otherwise, and a somewhat wicked gleam took his eyes, and he had the nerve to smirk at her, “And what do you, personally, think of me exactly?”Rey frowned, not sure what the tone in his voice was indicative of—teasing? Negging? Infuriating cockiness? It was all unclear—and her hands balled into fists on her hips, “Truthfully? I don’t if I can help it. Regardless, you’re not really the topic of conversation here.”
Relationships: Jannah/Rose Tico, Kylo Ren/Rey, Poe Dameron/Finn, Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 39
Kudos: 98





	1. Summer Blues

**Author's Note:**

> Excited to start this new wip :))) If you're following my writing after my last fic, thank you so much for supporting my writing! If you're new entirely, same to you! There's not too much reylo going on in the first chapter, but I promise we'll be seeing a lot more of our boy soon ;) 
> 
> comments are greatly appreciated :)

_Drip. Drip. Drip._

Rey Niima was convinced she was about to lose her mind. To begin with her tale of woe, she was sitting on the floor of a dingy basement also standing in as a classroom. Said classroom had no windows, hideous artificial lighting exclusively, and every time a toilet was flushed from the upstairs level, a pipe would ominously drip for minutes on end somewhere in the walls. The floor had not been bothered to be waxed by the custodians over the summer, and in some corners, there were certain _evidences_ that she shared a classroom with rodents of a sort. It was truly a crime, she thought, that an art class would be taught in an environment so ascetic as to be a complete wasteland for creativity—even for her, the soon-to-be art teacher.

If there was one thing Rey had always been good at in her life, it was that she could always find creative inspiration no matter the circumstances. Raised mostly in the foster system until she was adopted at sixteen by a kind old diner owner, Maz Kanata, she’d known her fair share of bleak circumstances. In the midst of her self-pitying, however, she conceded that at least in all the foster homes there was always _a window_. Maybe the window wasn’t always in her bedroom, but there was always a window in some room, or better yet, a door through which she could escape either physically or mentally. Rey stared at the cinder block in front of her face. There was some evidence of art, though not exactly an evidence of creativity seeing as said art was mostly penises drawn by rebellious high-school trolls.

_Drip. Drip. Drip._

Rey groaned and jumped to her feet at last, determined to drown out the sounds of toilet water and her own morbid musings. There were old, dusty speakers she’d found in a cardboard box upon entering her classroom, but she was glad to discover that they connected to her phone via an auxiliary cord rather well. The deceptively upbeat sounds of Fleetwood Mac filled her empty room, and Rey allowed herself a moment to breathe. Her situation was not preferable, but it could always be worse, she reminded herself before opening her eyes and running a hand over the canvas laying on her desk. She’d painted two large canvases the day before, turning her fury over the lack of inspiration into two simple yet rather delightful depictions of looking at flowers through a window. Ever her own critic, Rey vowed to add more detail as time went on.

The walls, barren cinder blocks, she took to rectifying first. The window paintings were hung on the wall opposing the door, in mimicry of the windows that should have been there. She then hung several simple design examples of the types of lines and textures and color schemes and color wheels conducive to what should be in an art classroom in tasteful displays. With her paint from home, she carefully painted over the obscenities and “anatomy art” that had been previously sharpied into the wall. An hour passed when at last she looked around her, and she was beginning to see the start of what had _the potential_ to be a decent classroom. She supposed at least—she’d never been a teacher before, nor had she ever intended to be. The last thing to hang on the wall were her professional qualifications, a master’s degree in fine arts.

Her fingers traced the frame Maz had gifted her with for graduation, and she breathed a wistful sigh for a future that seemed incredibly far from her reach. Rey was an artist. She wanted to _be_ an artist. She wanted to be respected and her art to be appreciated. Instead, she’d spent a year out of college working in Maz’s diner as a waitress—the same as when she was in high school—living in her old room in Maz’s house and filling low-rate commissions from locals. There had been one offer of relevant work, but Rey had naively turned down the museum position, back when she still thought she would make her way in the world with her brushes. After a year had passed, and dread had set in and Rey had had another panic attack about her future, Maz had set a gentle reminder that the art teacher position was open at Arkanis High School one county away next to Rey’s morning coffee. Rey was less naïve a second time.

The interview had gone…acceptable, decent enough. There was not the level of respect that Rey would have liked from her new boss. Principal Snoke was only present for half the meeting—the second half, he conceded that Rey was the only interviewee who did not show up stoned, so she may as well have the position and let the assistant principal conduct the rest—but through subtle slights and condescending tones, he had made it very clear that art was not a priority subject at his school. Rey had not paid attention and only thanked the stars for good fortune and accepted the position, no questions asked. Which led her to the basement. Not only was she located to the basement, which is where the unwanted or punished teachers or subjects are allocated (according to the head of the English department, or, as she liked to call him: a massive dick), but she was also expected to buy her own classroom supplies. Some old brushes and paints had been found in storage from the previous teacher, but most had been used for too long and in less-than-desirable conditions (presumably for the same reason she was expected to buy more out of pocket _, budget cuts_ ) that she had to throw out more than half.

A knock on her opened door interrupted her thoughts as she was arranging desks around the room. In the doorway stood her fellow basement dweller, the history teacher and head of the history department—Rey was still trying to guess whether Snoke was punishing him by putting him in the basement, or if history was similarly as useless as art in the principal’s opinion. There were only two classrooms in the basement level as well as a graffitied strip of hallway and a single staff bathroom to which they were blessedly the sole users of—Rey was delighted to find that they were at least granted the dignity of not having to share a bathroom with students. She’d crossed the graffitied hallway once before to introduce herself to her unlucky companion, but he wasn’t much of a talker or just didn’t like her or was just an ass.

Rey attempted an awkward smile, unsure of what his presence meant. An attempt at introduction himself? “Can I help you?”

He did not return her smile, only darted his eyes around her classroom before settling them on her and frowning. “Would you turn your music down?”

It wasn’t an unreasonable request, so she shrugged and attempted another smile despite his clear annoyance. “Sure thing, sorry if it was bothering you.”

“It was, thank you,” he clipped before spinning on his heels to retreat from her room.

 _Ah, so he_ is _just an ass,_ Rey mused to herself as she turned the vocals of Stevie Nicks to a lower and hopefully more suitable volume. She walked to her open door and shut it for good measure, but she peered across the hall for the briefest of moments before she did. His classroom was sparse. There was nothing on the walls save the blackboard that had come with the classroom (she had been shocked to know that schools _still_ had those) and nothing in the way of decorations, which made the room seem to shrink on itself in the most morbid fashion. She remembered popping her head in to say hello and seeing only two notable items of decoration: a bookshelf full of non-history related books and a tiny American flag on his desk next to a card that read, “Ask about taking A.P. United States History.” There were several cardboard boxes in the corner of the room, which indicated to her that he had been relocated to the basement—she suspected a punishment for some form of behavior from their ancient principal. The man reflected the room, or the room reflected the man, either way, both seemed miserable and dull.

Rey put her surly basement neighbor from her mind as her phone buzzed on her desk, the little screen lighting up with a text from her best friend. At the sight of his name, she smiled, then she read the text and frowned.

Finn was part of the reason she’d summoned the courage to apply for the teaching position. He and his husband, Poe, were also both teachers at Arkanis. Finn was something like her brother, a little bit older, but they’d been the longest foster siblings either had ever had back when they were both in the system. They’d been separated after living together for four years, but they’d always stayed in touch, even when he enlisted in the military right after high school. No matter her personal views on war, she understood what it was like to not have anywhere else to go, no other foreseeable options for the future, and Finn certainly had not had a Maz to stick up for him. After an honorable discharge and a permanent limp in his leg and meager VA checks to pay for small things, he was offered the position of JROTC instructor at Arkanis. That was where he met Poe Dameron, the gym teacher, and that had been that. Their wedding had been last year, and it had been disgustingly beautiful, and Rey had designed their wedding invitations for free and had given a speech that she cried halfway through and then proceeded to get enormously intoxicated on the open bar.

They had been planning on getting _decently_ intoxicated at the local bar that evening with two of their coworker/friends that Rey had yet to meet. They _were_ , at least, as Finn had only just informed her that he and Poe would be unable to make it because they’d apparently forgotten Poe’s mother’s birthday was that night. Frowning, she angrily typed out a reply.

_R: so that’s a no for tonight then?_

_F: I texted Rose, she and Kay are still good to go_

_R: well then I’m not going_

_F: why not?_

Rey was metaphorically cracking her knuckles for a fight when another knock came to her door before it was opened—despite her giving no response to the initial knock. It was the history teacher again. He had his apparent signature scowl and was pinching the bridge of his nose while squinting his dark, flinty eyes at her. She was affronted by his barging in again as well as the dislike for her written plainly all over his pained expression.

She crossed her arms over her chest and nodded for him to go on with what he came to say. His tone was clipped and cold, “Your music, _once again_.”

With him still standing in front of her, she turned the music down further until there was no possible way he could hear it from across the hall. She raised an eyebrow in challenge, and he smiled just slightly and pulled his hand from its pinching, but it was no kind or grateful smile, only full of snark and malice. “Thank you,” he said with great deliberation and sarcasm.

As he walked out, she slammed her door shut and hoped the loud noise of it made him jump. She went back to looking angrily at her phone screen. _Why not?_ Had Finn conveniently forgotten that she had never met Rose or Kay before? She didn’t even know what they looked like. Not that Rey had any trouble with making friends or socializing, but it was the initial meetings that were nerve-wracking. There was always something about first impressions that Rey had never been able to shake. Growing up with a childhood like hers, she was always desperate for people to like her and want to know her more and come back for her. Even after living with Maz for years and having Finn’s constant, never-wavering companionship, some old scars never faded. What if she was boring because she was too nervous to say anything? Finn and Poe were supposed to be there to introduce her and now, it was just going to be her and two people she didn’t known who already knew each other. Her fingers were a flurry of activity as she typed out a long response, but she was cut short of sending it when Finn’s contact picture filled the screen.

“Finn,” she clipped in the speaker of the phone.

“Why won’t you just go without us?”

She flung a hand dramatically in the air and rolled her eyes, knowing he was not able to see her, “Because I don’t know them? Why can’t the two of them just go together? They already know each other!”

“Because they really wanted to meet you!” There was an earnestness in his tone, and he sounded entirely too happy and very much like he was about to piss her off with flattery. “Poe and I talk about you all the time, and they’ve seen some of your art, and they were really excited to finally see you. What’s the harm in one evening?”

Rey clenched her jaw, “Well that was all fine and well, but you were supposed to be there so that I couldn’t be awkward and horrible.” She rolled her eyes to herself again, “Also, I don’t believe for a second that Poe has ever talked about me unless it was sarcastic.”

Poe’s voice rang clear over the receiver, “Hey, Rey, thought it might be nice to let you know you’re on speaker. Before you say something you might, I don’t know, regret.”

There was no limit to the amount of times Rey could roll her eyes in one conversation it seemed, and she snarked back, “I would regret nothing. Anyway, this is all _your_ fault.”

“My fault?” He cried, and she could imagine him looking scandalized with a hand over his heart, dramatic twat that he was. “However could that be, Niima?”

“It’s funny that I can’t decide if you deliberately forgot your own mother’s birthday just to screw me over, or if you really did forget your own mother’s birthday. Better yet, I don’t know which is worse.”

She could hear him scoff in mock offense over the line, but it was Finn who wrestled back the control of the conversation, “Okay, okay, we’re sorry. Poe is _especially_ sorry. We really did forget, but listen, Rose and Kaydel are really nice and trust me, they can more than fill up gaps in the conversation. It’s not possible to be awkward with them.”

“Finn,” she whined, “can’t you just reschedule?”

“Can’t you just go?” He quipped.

“Can’t you just tell Poe’s mum that she’s celebrated enough birthdays?”

“Hey—” Poe interjected, but Finn cut him off.

“Rey, what’s the harm? You’re just going to meet them and drink a little, and by the time you realize that you were nervous for nothing, you’ll be pleasantly buzzed and in an Uber back to your apartment.”

“But—” she started before there was _another_ knock on her door, and she whirled around in the peak of annoyance to see the history teacher glaring at her _again._

Finn, who could not see nor hear the man’s presence in her classroom, continued in her ear, “Rey, they’ll love you, just go and have a good time. You won’t even miss us!”

Still staring at the teacher and unsure of how to deal with _two_ manbabies at the same time, she spit into the phone without thinking, “Fine, I’ll go!” She hung up as he was starting to say something and she, still annoyed from the turn of the day’s events, glared and snapped at the man in her doorway, “What? What could you possibly want now?”

“You’re talking incredibly loud,” his tone was obnoxiously haughty, and it was too bad for him that Rey was already in the mood to strangle something before he walked in to gripe about something for the _third time_.

Her eyes narrowed at him, “I am _incredibly_ sorry.”

His eyes widened, and he stepped back slightly as if _she_ was the one in the wrong, “Have I offended you somehow?”

“ _Somehow_ ,” she scoffed in disbelief at either his inclination for being obtuse or his insistence on being intentionally so. “You’ve come into my room three times now to complain about my,” she used air quotes because, really, he was picky and ridiculous, “ _noise level_ , and you don’t even have the decency to be polite about it!”

He crossed his arms defensively in turn, “Why should I have to be polite? _You’ve_ continued to be a distraction to my work, so if you’re looking for an apology, look somewhere else.”

She scoffed again, “ _Your work_. It’s not even the start of the year yet!” Before he could comment something smarmy back about work ethic or some other obnoxious subject, she piped up again, wagging a finger at him wildly, “It isn’t _my_ fault that the walls are paper thin. If you’re going to be teaching down here this year then _you_ might want to build a little tolerance for noise.”

“Or maybe _you_ could endeavor to be more respectful of other classrooms!”

Rey could not think of anything else to say to make the man see sense, so she just settled for, “Get out of my room.”

“With pleasure,” he snarled.

When the door had slammed, and he had no intention of returning (she hoped), Rey sat in her chair and stewed. She thought about how the year was going to go with an insufferable man next door to her, and she felt alone and tired.

* * *

Out of sheer nervousness, Rey arrived at the bar half an hour early and was halfway through nursing the beer in between her clammy palms. The bar boasted an old presence in the town, Chandrila, with pictures and newspaper clips of the town’s history plastered across its brick-walled interior, but it had clearly been renovated somewhat recently. Rey was admiring the weird, hipster touch of knick-knack chandelier lighting when two women around her age approached her booth. The one on the left of the approach had black hair pulled back into a bun behind her head, side bangs stuck in what seemed to a natural flip and fan to frame her heart-shaped face, and a mildly intimidating smile beaming at Rey. The other was a blonde and had something of a casual smile, almost lazy, but in the way that made you think there was more beyond the smile, and Rey was not exactly put at ease by it.

The flippy-haired, smiling one waved with a gust of enthusiasm and her words nearly came out so fast that Rey could almost not comprehend them, “You’re Rey, right? I’m Rose. I remember you from Finn and Poe’s wedding last year. I meant to talk to you then, but I had to leave early for a conference the next day, but I’m so glad to finally meet you! Finn talks about you all the time, so much that I feel like I already know you—”

“ _I_ already know you,” the blonde, Kaydel (Rey assumed), said with a bit of a smirk as she slid into the booth across from Rey and allowed Rose to slide in next to her.

Rey blinked in panic as she was very positive she had never met Kaydel in her life ever before, “Me?”

A server came to the table and sat two drinks down, a margarita for Rose and an IPA for Kaydel. Kaydel laughed and sipped her drink before she startled Rey and grasped her hand where it had been laying on the table, “It’s alright, I don’t expect you to remember. Drunken bathroom friends rarely last, you know?”

Rey wracked her brain before stumbling upon a distant, blurry, put-off memory, and she gasped and smiled, “ _You!_ ”

Rose interjected, “When was this? What happened?”

Kaydel turned to her coworker grinning, “You know the girl I met in the bathroom at Finn and Poe’s wedding?”

“Which one?” Rose truly seemed at a loss, Kaydel must have made many friends in the bathroom that night.

Rey smiled and laughed, her nerves dissipating at the sudden easy conversation being struck between them, “You said you liked my speech even though I nearly snotted myself on stage from crying.”

She leaned back as far as the booth allowed and sipped her beer. “Yes, and you said you liked my boob, singular.”

“Because it was out of your dress, yes, I recall,” Rey giggled.

Rose’s eyebrows shot up with a certain comedic exaggeratedness, “Oh that one! The savior of the boob is what you kept calling her when I checked on you the next day in the hotel room.”

“I’m flattered,” Rey smiled into the sip of her drink. Perhaps Finn was right, they seemed nice.

* * *

Several more beers and several tipsy life stories later, they were best friends. Not exactly, Rey had not quite told them all the sad, innermost woes of her soul and existence as Finn knew and Poe had guessed at, but they knew _all_ about how she felt about having to teach art in a basement. They knew _all_ about how she felt about having to teach art at all and how she felt about the principal and her rude basement neighbor.

“Much of a prick that Hux is,” Rose explained by gesturing loosely with her fingers grasping the stem of her mixed drink (Rey rather feared she would tip it over entirely), “he’s right. The people old wrinkle-sack Snoke doesn’t like or the subjects he doesn’t care about get thrown in the dungeon. Snoke’s been trying to cut art for years, but the other county school’s principal fights him on it every time in the school board meetings.”

“Guess I should thank him for my job then,” Rey griped and cheered to the invisible principal of Chandrila High School to which she apparently owed the existence of her job.

Kaydel, who’d become more energetic and slightly wild (though Rey, from their apparent first meeting, already vaguely knew what kind of a drunk she was) with more drinks, piped in, “ _Her_ actually. She was my English teacher in high school. Matter of fact, she’s the mother of your fellow dungeon mate.”

“ _Solo_ is Leia Organa’s _son_?” Rose deadpanned with obvious skepticism.

“Solo? That’s his name?” Rey queried, her interest piqued.

“Ben Solo,” Rose rolled her eyes, “supreme asshole. He started teaching at Arkanis five years ago and Snoke made him the head of the history department a year later even though he was an _English_ major in college. He’s so far up Snoke’s ass it’s unbelievable.”

“If he’s such a kiss up and Snoke likes him so much, why is he in the basement at all,” Rey wondered aloud.

Rose shrugged and guessed, “Not sure. Mitaka said he heard them have a huge fight in Snoke’s office at the end of the year, something about test scores and personal days. Now I guess he’s been moved to the basement.”

Kay rested her head on her fist and blinked, “Not sure what Ben’s issue is. He was alright in high school.”

Rose’s eyes widened, “Oh, _please_ tell me what surly Solo was like in high school. Did he go through an emo phase? Like a really bad one with straightened side bangs and horrific eyeliner? Did he wear an angsty chain on the belt of his very angsty, ripped, black jeans? Did he write slam poetry about how society is going to hell because of the preps—”

Kay giggled and covered Rose’s mouth with her hand. “Stop it! No, he was normal. I mean, I didn’t know him too well,” she squealed and pulled her hand away from her mouth when Rose licked her palm. “Rose! Please, we’re professional adults here! The educators of America’s children! But anyway, he was just one of the smart kids, you know. Valedictorian of his class, I think? He was a senior when I was a freshman, but he helped me find a classroom once when I got lost. He was alright, like I said. Poe would know him better, they were closer in age.”

“Well now he’s an ass,” Rey snarked and Kay conceded with a tip of her beer in Rey’s direction.

“I’d stay away from him. Hux too and Phasma,” Rose’s face had a hint of seriousness to it, and Rey nodded in turn. “They’re the kiss-ups to Snoke. The minute they see you talking about something or doing something they think Snoke wouldn’t like—which is pretty much anything—they run off and snitch. Phasma got her promotion from instructional facilitator to the assistant principal on Snoke’s good word. Hux and Solo hate each other because Solo wants the English position and Snoke won’t give it to him. They’re always in some kind of pissing contest, and the minute one of them thinks they can get the upper hand on the other, they will. Then Mitaka is,” Rose trailed off in thought.

“A spineless worm?” Kay supplied.

Rose slapped her shoulder, “He’s nice! But yeah, spineless.”

“I don’t know most of these people,” Rey admitted with a blush. “Phasma is the assistant principal right? Hux is the head of the English department and Mitaka is?”

“The secretary. Then you’ve got the rest of us, the good guys,” Kay laughed and slung an arm around Rose’s shoulders. “Finn and Poe you already know obviously. I teach biology and chemistry—”

Rose jabbed a thumb in her friend’s direction, “She holds the record for the most fire alarms set off, naturally. I teach agriculture and mechanics—”

Kay poked Rose’s shoulder, “And _she_ holds the record for most students she’s insulted without getting fired.”

Rose sniffed, “You try having the pimple-faced sixteen-year-old boys try to tell _you_ how to fix an engine and do your job and then see what you think. Besides,” she picked at her nails, “they respect me more when I talk to them at their level.”

“Give them hell, Rose,” Rey laughed, thoroughly impressed.

“But anyway, then there’s Jannah,” Kaydel had a glimmer of mischief in her eye as they slid to Rose and she tipped her head back to finish off her beer, “Rose, you should really be the one to talk about Jannah.”

To Rey’s intrigue and Kaydel’s delight, Rose’s face turned a shade quite similar to the shade of her namesake, “Jannah’s the other JROTC instructor and the athletic director.”

“That’s it?” Kay pressed, a smirk written all over the unbidden delight expressed in her features.

“She has an incredible physique,” Rose pretended to be very interested in her drink all of a sudden, “she runs the track every morning before school. She,” she looked away, “she keeps it together.”

“I’m sure she does,” Rey smiled but spared her new friend from having to answer anymore questions. “Anyone else I should know?”

Kaydel waved her hand, “Well there’s Beaumont—Beau, we call him, which he hates. He’s the head of the math department, but honestly he’s kind of the worst.”

Rose nodded in agreement, “Perfectly nice, but a professional mansplainer. Even Hux and Solo aren’t as bad as him. They might be dicks, but they’re the _we-still-respect-women_ sort of dicks, which I can respect about them at the very least.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“So,” Kay switched subjects, swaying slightly back into Rose’s space on accident, “you’re coming to the homecoming party this year, aren’t you?”

Rey blinked, “Am I supposed to know what that is?”

Rose explained, “It’s the fall party Finn and Poe throw at their house, three years in a row now, always around homecoming for the teachers.”

“It became a tradition thanks to me, you’re welcome. I make Poe throw it since he asks me to teach the girls’ sex-ed class every year. It’s his job to supply the drinks, and my job to drink and forget that I can’t even tell high schoolers about birth control in this state,” Kay rolled her eyes at the last bit. “I do it anyway, and if the parents get mad at me, at least they don’t have to pay for diapers for their child’s child.”

“America’s educators at their finest, and America’s sexual education at its worst,” Rose cheered with the last of her third margarita.

“Oh,” Rey continued to blink. She wasn’t exactly sure how to feel about a raging party thrown at her best friend’s house that she didn’t know about. Not that she had any real right to be angry, she reminded herself, it was for Finn and Poe’s coworkers, which she was not one of up until recently. Still, the always anxious part of her brain intruded, it didn’t sit right with her that Finn had a whole life and set of friends outside of her. However, she mustered a smile and said, “Well, it sounds fun, so I’ll be there. Any excuse to have a good time.”

The conversation lulled after that as their collective buzzes wore off and left them a bit sleepy. They hailed Ubers, Rose and Kay sharing one as they lived in the same apartment complex, and Rey using another since her apartment was across town in a different direction. When she arrived at her apartment and let her purse hit the floor, she sighed and rested her back against her front door. The apartment was old but new to her, Maz insisting that while she loved to have Rey around, she would be wanting her own space to work at home. At the time, Rey hadn’t realized how much work would be really required of her outside of the classroom. Rey’s eyes fluttered to her kitchen table with her agenda and worksheets spread across it, and she smiled grimly; lesson plans, the new bane if her existence. A newfound respect had filled her for teachers in general. She suspected there was much work that was required of them that they were not even paid to do—amongst all of the things they _do_ get paid to do and should be paid _more_ for.

Exhausted from socializing, despite it being pleasant and—dare she even admit it—fun, Rey let her legs stumble to her couch. Class started that Monday, and she still had her syllabus to finish typing up and to make copies of for each of her three classes she was teaching, and the lesson plans she had made only carried her as far as Wednesday. She typed out a “made it back without dying” text to the new group chat she, Kay, and Rose had created with lethargic fingers and yawned. Putting all that she had two days to accomplish from her mind, she closed her eyes and fell asleep in her shoes on her couch, makeup still on her face and all.


	2. A Week of Firsts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First day of school, first week of school, first time teaching...not the first fight between Miss Niima and Mr. Solo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting the first two chapters on the same day because the second is a bit short and I honestly couldn't decide if the first and second needed to be one chapter or not, so I'll just post them as if they are haha, hope you enjoy!

Rey wasn’t sure she had ever been so nervous before. Of course, she had been. Nobody made it out of an art program without having ever felt as if they were about to combust from overwhelming levels of anxiety. However, as often is the case with stress, nothing else ever feels as pressing as the current stressor. The first day of class—and subsequently Rey’s first day of teaching ever—was one such significant stressor. Students were filing into her room at a lazy pace, the early morning hours causing her beginner’s level students’ eyes to droop and feet to shuffle. She stood at the front of the classroom and hoped that she did not convey to the students just how horrific and nervous she felt. Waving at them showed how her hands shook, so she settled for what she hoped looked like warm and welcoming smiles. Rey mustered up the strength not to give a full-body flinch when the bell rang which signaled she as supposed to begin speaking. Another smile before she started to surely make a fool of herself.

“Good morning class,” there, she thought, an easy enough start. “How was everyone’s summer break?” Groans erupted from the students, and Rey cursed herself for asking what she even remembered to be the second worst question anyone ever asked a student (the first being, of course: what are you going to do with your life?).

“Ah, perhaps not then. I’m Miss Niima, and this is beginner’s level art. If anyone is not supposed to be taking art, there is no shame in leaving now,” Rey said with a small smile and several students smiled in return.

Her first two classes went pleasantly enough that Rey thought she would not mind being a teacher, if only until she got back on her feet. However, they were still mostly younger students who had less of a passion for art and more of a passion for checking off their art credit on their transcripts. It was her last class of the day, her third period—just after lunch and just before her free period, the machinations of her perfect headspace—that made her understand, to some degree, why people could enjoy being or aspire to be teachers. The class was a combination of Advanced Art students and the AP Studio Art students (Rey was already stressed about handling an AP class, but she figured that with the subject being art, her involvement was only necessary to a limited point), and they were _lovely._ Even with it only being syllabus day, they were mature and kind and smiled at her and asked valid questions about what skills they would be developing over the year as if they actually _cared._ Rey could see her own high school self in the fifteen or so students sitting in the circle of desks she’d made around herself (she’d read on the internet that a circle made for a more open and inclusive environment to share constructive and positive feedback in).

The day following—and her first real lessons that weren’t just reiterations of, “I would never limit the amount of times you can pee, just let me know and don’t take advantage of it,” but _actually_ teaching kids about art—was delightful. However, she noticed a change in her favorite class’ mood. It was not that they weren’t the same caring and excited-to-create students that they were the day before, only there were nervous mutterings amongst the Advanced Art students—mostly junior years. Rey had just assigned a baseline art prompt to the advanced students and was sequestered with the AP students, helping them brainstorm what the themes of their AP portfolios could consist of. One such AP student, a sweet girl with a (somehow) tastefully dyed orange pixie cut, gave lingering sigh and a mournful look to the clock on the wall.

“Alright, what’s going on today? Everyone looks miserable,” Rey gave in and asked her circle of brainstormers.

The pixie cut—Bea, Rey thought her name was—responded with a small, sweet, miserable smile, “We have APUSH next class. There was a reading we were assigned over summer, and now we have a unit test. Big one. Essay at the end and everything.”

Rey was well aware of who the AP United States History teacher was. She had not missed that card and tiny American flag on his desk. That knowledge in mind did not make her response any better than it would have been.

Forgetting that it was likely unprofessional to openly criticize another teacher to their students, Rey blurted, “On the second day? That’s ridiculous.”

Her students blinked in surprise at her and before a furious blush could spread across her face, they started to smile and laugh a bit, and one of the boys nodded with an impish grin and said, “You’re alright, Miss Niima.”

She stammered to correct herself, “I don’t mean to say that it isn’t perhaps an effective way to test the memory.” The students were still smiling knowingly, “I’m sure history is serious business. Not much to assign readings for on art,” she shrugged and gave a weak smile, “what do I know?”

The bell rang and their grins turned to grimaces as they packed up to move across the hall. Rey felt for them, truly, and she tried her hand at a pitiful, sympathetic wave, “Good luck, hope to see you all alive and unstressed tomorrow.”

Her comment earned several dark chuckles and earned plenty more than just one ‘thank you.’ Finn visited her then as they both had a free fourth period to check on her. He’d not been able to do so after her first day because of something related to Poe’s family. That had been a common occurrence as of late. She didn’t waste time commenting on it, though, his time for her had been so precious and so few and far between, that there was so little to spare on petty bickering. Instead, she swallowed her gripes and welcomed his hug like a sunny day after weeks of rain, and it wasn’t so hard then to focus on grinning.

“How was your first day? And your second? So sorry again for having to run off yesterday. Shara and Kes came down with the flu at the same time, and Poe was worried since they’re not as young as they used to be, you know how it is,” he nodded knowledgeably.

Rey supposed she did, in theory. Maz never got sick and had not been sick a single day since Rey met her at the age of sixteen, and she was twenty years Poe’s parents’ senior and still had yet to retire. Making such a comment, of course, would lead to nothing, so instead she nodded and negated, “No, no, of course, don’t even apologize. Just a first day of a job, I’ve had plenty before this one, nothing special.”

“Right,” he nodded some more, and Rey was beginning to feel awkward, “well, anyway, how was it?”

She shrugged, “Like I said, just another first day. I really like my last class, the advanced kids. They really care, you know?”

He smiled a genuine smile then, and Rey felt the casual intimacy seep back between them and breathed a discreet sigh of relief. “Yeah, it’s always better when they give a shit. All the older classes are that way. Do you like it?” She blinked at him, and he continued, “Teaching, I mean. I know it’s not what you really want to do, but do you think it’ll be good until you get back on your feet?”

Rey shrugged again, not wholly comfortable with this particular line of question, “Well, anyone can do anything for a while if it means getting paid right?”

“I,” he paused and only slightly narrowed his eyes, “that’s not really what I mean, but I guess that’s true.”

She sat on one of her desks and tried to change topics, “My advanced class was pretty stressed today.”

Finn followed suit much to her relief, “Already? What did you do to them?”

She chuckled and hit his shoulder, “Finn! No, it wasn’t me, it’s that asshole across the hall. He assigned a huge unit test today apparently. The juniors in my class go straight to his after mine.”

“Ah, you mean Solo,” there was that knowledgeable nod again. “Yeah, he’s a real piece of work. Runs his students ragged preparing them for the AP exam at the end of the year. My kids complain about it too sometimes. When we go to the weekend competitions, you know, they’re always up to their ears in readings and quiz prep and essay assignments. Between him and Hux, junior year is always the worst.”

Rey shook her head, feeling a bit angry, “I know it’s important to help kids be prepared because then you’re just a bad teacher, but if they have no will to live isn’t that just as bad? Or,” she scoffed, “I don’t know, worse?

Finn shrugged, “Solo and Hux do have the highest AP scores in the county for their respective subjects, but,” he nodded grimly, “between you and me—and Poe, who I definitely told immediately—Mitaka left some of the class climate surveys at the front desk once, which he absolutely is not supposed to do, but I saw some of the complaints sections and they were all about those two. What makes it worse I think is that the guidance counselor is only here twice a week because budget cuts forced her to be the guidance counselor for all the schools in the county. So, there’s really not a professional outlet for kids to release that stress to.”

“That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, you’ve got to be joking,” Rey shook her head in disbelief, “the school _has_ to have a full-time counselor. That’s _insane_.”

“Budget cuts,” was Finn’s tight-lipped response.

“Budget cuts,” Rey repeated morosely as she gave a wayward look to the new supplies she had to buy for herself and her students, “I keep hearing more and more of that. Has it always been like this for teachers?”

Her oldest friend swung himself into a chair as if he himself were a student who belonged there. “I suppose so. You get used to disappointment after a while.”

Rey chewed on her lip for a moment, considering her next words carefully, “Then why do it? Why be a teacher if this is what you get for it?”

Finn shook his head and smiled the smile she had come to know over many years as the one that told her _something_ was coming her way, “Well that’s something you have to figure out for yourself. It’s different for every teacher.”

“Well,” Rey sniffed and looked to her window paintings, pretending if only in her mind that she was looking off at the field beyond the window she herself had created, “as it is, I’m not _really_ a teacher. Just for a little while.”

* * *

It was the end of the first week of school, and Rey had anxiety twisting her stomach into knots. She’d waited until all the students had filed out of their respective classrooms and then a little bit longer because—God, she was nervous. After more days of students bemoaning how late they’d stayed up to keep up and to study for a chapter reading check quiz on Friday and the constant dread they felt at the prospect of the bell ringing for fourth period, Rey decided to have a chat. While Finn had noted both Mr. Solo and Mr. Hux as the absolute worst hardass teachers Arkanis had to offer, Rey did not really feel that her gripes applied to Hux. After all, half her juniors decided not to take his class anyway because they didn’t even think it was worth it. For some reason, Ben Solo’s United States History course was, in their eyes, and if affected the mood of her third period class. This, she would bring up to him, and hopefully, he wouldn’t take his inevitable anger out on the students. Hopefully.

Rey summoned a breath of courage and knocked on his open door, peeking in as she did so. He had been elbow-deep—metaphorically speaking—into grading a substantial stack of papers on his desk, dreaded red pen making furious scratches in hand, when he looked up and met her eyes. Recognition flashed for a moment and then his dark brown eyes narrowed in what was clearly a look of suspicion. Rey tried for a weak smile, but his eyes only narrowed further.

“Hello,” her voice wavered a bit, but it sounded friendly enough.

He leaned back in his chair and pushed a black lock of hair from where it had fallen in front of his eyes, and it looked—Rey’s brain stuttered for a moment because, yeah, an asshole like Ben Solo had _no right_ to look like _that_. His voice was as deep yet soft as she recalled it being from their previous unfortunate encounters—and yes, his voice had _no right_ to sound like _that_ —and while the words were polite, the tone was enough to snap her from her traitorous thoughts and focus on her task, “Miss Niima, what can I do for you?”

The words dripped with sarcasm, but Rey blinked for a moment as she processed the fact that he did, in fact, actually know her name, which she had not expected him to remember. Nevertheless, she rallied to the occasion and walked into his classroom, “Listen, I know we got off on the wrong foot.” A dry, humorless, staccato chuckle left his tight-lipped, grim smile, but she continued as if she’d heard nothing, “I just wanted to talk to you about something, and I didn’t want you to think it had anything to do with what I, personally, think of you.”

Mr. Solo leaned forward slightly and entwined his fingers together to fold on his stack of papers where the wood of his desk would have been otherwise, and somewhat wicked gleam took his eyes, and he had the nerve to smirk at her, “And what do you, _personally_ , think of me exactly?”

Rey frowned, not sure what the tone in his voice was indicative of—teasing? Negging? Infuriating cockiness? It was all unclear—and her hands balled into fists on her hips, “Truthfully? I don’t if I can help it. Regardless, you’re not really the topic of conversation here.”

“And what would that be?”

“The students.”

“Ah,” he nodded both with a knowledgeable look and yet also with an imperious one that made her grit her teeth, “well, that would be our collective job.”

“It _would_ ,” Rey pressed, “and it would be our jobs to make sure they were learning in what is supposed to be a safe environment, would you not agree?”

“Of course,” he said with a surprising tone of calmness and genuineness that nearly gave Rey pause, “am I to assume that your next words are something which you are concerned threatens such an environment?”

“I think so, I think mental health and safety is just as important a priority as physical health and safety,” Rey waited for him to nod in agreement and only delivered the punchline when he did so. “I think you’re too hard on your students.”

He blinked as if surprised that the conversation had taken such a turn when he must have known when she walked in that they were not about to sign a peace treaty. “Excuse me?”

She took a deep, steadying breath, “Listen, I’m not trying to say you’re a bad teacher or a bad person who doesn’t care about his students, but I have a lot of juniors in my third period class and they talk an awful lot about how stressed they are—”

“No,” he interrupted her, his voice angry yet still that measure of calm lying underneath, “I think that is _exactly_ what you’re trying to say. For what other purpose would you have in rambling about student health and safety if not for that?”

Her heart stuttered in her chest, the conversation taking a turn for the worst quicker than she had anticipated, “Hear me out—”

“I don’t have to hear you out, I don’t have to sit and listen to _anyone_ who waltzes into _my_ classroom and tries to tell _me_ how I’m doing bad at _my_ job,” his eyebrows were furrowed, and he was clearly furious, but he made no move to stand up or to threaten her, which she was grateful for. “What do you know, anyway? I didn’t see an education degree on _your_ wall. I’d just as much assume that you’re only here because you ran out of options.”

Rey held up a shaking finger, “Stop, my credentials are _not_ what this is about—”

“Let me guess,” he narrowed his eyes so much that it looked like he was actually squinting at her, “you followed your passion for art only to find that everyone who had ever told you not to do it was right: that there are no jobs for artists, that an art degree is a useless degree—”

“Stop it,” Rey’s words sounded hollow and desperate, and she was baffled by how the conversation had managed to take such a turn.

The infuriating and infuriated history teacher pressed on despite her outburst, “So, now you’re here as a last resort option—you don’t care about teaching, you pretend to care about the students but you’re just going to leave once you’ve found your big break, if you ever do, and never think twice about them—and while you’re here—”

“Please stop,” Rey was pleading.

“ _And while you’re here_ ,” he repeated with a raised voice. “you’re just going to put insipid thoughts into their impressionable brains about following their passions like you did so that they end up just the same as you. Miserable and passive.”

His words dropped like a stone between the two of them and left carnage on Rey’s mind. Belatedly, she realized that she was crying, a cold tear or two running from her chin to her neck in the most uncomfortable fashion and another wobbling but not committing to fully dripping off the end of her nose. Mr. Solo’s dark and furious eyes were blown wide as opposed to their squinting moments before, and he looked baffled and surprised at himself or her tears or something else that Rey wasn’t aware of. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her wipe away her tears and she held her head higher, spine straightening, and shoulders squared.

“Maybe you’re right about me,” Rey began quietly, a sardonic and watery smile twisting her features, “but at least I remember what it was like to be a high schooler. I remember what it’s like to have dreams and to enjoy things and forgive me if I just wanted to preserve that for them if only for a little while. Sorry to have caused any offense,” she was not sorry at all, which he absolutely knew, “but I think you’re a miserable prick.”

Shoulders still squared, she turned and marched her way out of his room. The declaration of war had been drafted, edited, and sent to the receiver with resounding success and casualty. With an abrupt stop in the hallway, her stomach lurched. Looking up at her with a shocked and awed expression was Bea, her student, who had been likely standing out of the _open_ door for some time, waiting patiently to speak to Mr. Solo. From the look on her face, she’d definitely heard it all.

“Bea,” Rey gasped, “what are you still doing here?”

The girl’s face blushed profusely all the way up to her ears sticking out of her orange hair, “I was just in my dad’s office for a bit working on homework, and I forgot I had a question for Mr. Solo about the chapter,” she trailed off looking thoroughly abashed.

“Who’s your dad?” Rey asked, more of a way to pretend as if Bea had not just heard her art teacher call her history teacher a miserable prick.

“Mr. Dameron,” she shuffled her feet and looked at Solo’s open door.

Shock set in Rey’s bones, and she blinked profusely, “What?”

“Um, yeah, do you want a,” the poor girl looked awkward as she inched towards the door, but she shuffled through her purse at her side and pulled out a pack of tissues, “tissue?”

Rey accepted it was furious blush, because, of course, not only had Bea heard everything, but her art teacher had also come out of her history’s teacher’s classroom in tears, “Um, yes, thank you. Have a great weekend.”

Rey fled back to her classroom and used shaking hands to open her phone, and Finn picked up on the fifth ring, “Rey?”

“When were you going to tell me that Poe not only has a kid I didn’t know about, but also that she was in my classroom? When was that going to become important? Or was I just supposed to figure that out myself?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our boy is a bit of "miserable prick" but that's alright, he thinks so too


	3. The Mighty Feud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey tries to find a way to end the feud between her and Arkanis High's most insufferable teacher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Sorry for the long wait, I hit a really bad writer's block, and I'm still not entirely pleased with how this turned out, but it's been a long enough wait now, so hopefully it's enjoyable! Let me know!

Sweltering August—though, of course, the basement was always rather cold (between both the temperature as well as the interactions between the two basement dwellers)—changed to the mysterious hot and cold weather of September that marked premature Halloween excitement, anticipation of all things pumpkin flavored, and most particularly, football games. The Arkanis High team, Rey had noted on the third football game she had been required to sell tickets for, were absolutely dirty and foul. Rey was thrilled when her requirements for attending the games required her to be in a position where she could not see the red-colored uniforms massacre the other team. Flags were thrown constantly and there was more than one occasion in which the other team’s player had to be wheeled out on a stretcher.

In the fourth quarter, the ticket stand was not required to be run as most people were leaving early as opposed to arriving obscenely late, and Rey was walking with Kaydel past the fundraiser booths and camping chairs at the bottom of the sizable stadium. They’d stopped and said hello to Rose who was running the fundraiser booth for the student government, in preparation for homecoming, taking place in less than a month. She ran a different booth each time and on occasion, one booth that served two different organizations. Rose was far and wide the busiest teacher by leading the Student Government, the Prom Committee, and the FFA. Kaydel was an unofficial leader of both the SGA and the Prom Committee, but she was more involved in her and Dameron’s Hiking Club—Dameron who she was not _not_ talking to, but any sort of peace between them since Finn’s wedding was certainly not present in their interactions.

“Please get me a hot chocolate, I beg of you,” Rose had pleaded with them, teeth chittering in the autumn night air, and at the time, Rey was happy to oblige, but then she saw who was working the concession stand, and she was…less obliged.

“You two are _still_ feuding?” Kaydel asked with an eyebrow arched, and a teasing smile tilting her lips.

Rey blushed when she accidentally made eye contact with _him_ ; the Hatfield, the Capulet, the Edison to her Tesla, the Aaron Burr—and _for Christ’s sake_ she was comparing him to historical feuds, _him_ the _history teacher._ Somehow, it only made her ire worse. She glared, and rather than taking her up on her glare back, he shook his head and walked away from the counter. Irritant. Coward.

“I take that as a yes,” said Kay, eyes flickering between the counter and Rey.

“Can’t I just give you my money and stay back here where it’s safe?” Rey could not stop the petulant whine in her voice, “I always end up saying the worst things when I’m around him, and tonight we’re surrounded by children and their parents and it would be inappropriate—”

Kaydel’s face was unamused, and her voice dry, “Look, Rey. For one, you already scarred Dameron’s kid who shared it with her friend who shared it with the entire student body. It’s not like it isn’t a well-known fact that the two of you would love nothing more than a bit of light strangulation—process that however your brain decides to.” She smirked, and Rey hit her shoulder but didn’t interrupt. “Besides, you’re an adult, he’s an adult, half the concession proceeds go to families affected by cancer in the school community, just go get your fucking hot chocolates.”

Rey started, a twinge of desperation in her tone, “But can’t you just—”

“Nope,” Kay shook her head, all seriousness save the delightful twinkle in her hazel eyes. “Prove to me that you know how to pay your bills and make your own doctor’s appointments and talk to people that you don’t really want to.”

Rey deadpanned, “By asking for two hot chocolates from my sworn enemy who may or may not spit in said hot chocolates without remorse, I will be proving my financial capabilities?”

“One-hundred percent,” Kay nodded emphatically. “Besides, look, he’s not even at the counter anymore, maybe someone else will take your order.”

“Fine, but I’m not that lucky,” and Rey was right, she was, indeed, not that lucky.

Ben Solo was alone in the concession stand, leaning against one of the kitchen counters with delicious casualness in the slightly scuffed jeans that she was surprised such an uptight asshole would deign to wear even outside of professional hours. His attention was drawn elsewhere, giving her time to smooth her grimace as she watched him toss back two tablets of Advil and dry swallow them like some kind of uncivilized animal. A moment passed where she was just standing there, watching him, and a small groan left his throat. Clearly, he did not think anyone was watching him or wanting hot chocolate so late in the game as his eyes screwed shut and he cradled his head in his hands, fingertips massaging his temples. Rey was tempted to walk away—no need to give him more of a headache than what he was already clearly having with her mere presence, but then she would have been standing there watching him in a pique of awkwardness for _nothing._

She cleared her throat, drummed her fingers on the counter, and pretended to be watching the game from afar to give him a second to collect himself. He seemed to have taken the hint, and she slowly slid her eyes from where they’d been unfocused on the stadium lights and right into his brown eyes turned amber in the yellow concession stand lighting. His lips were pressed in a thin line, either from the headache or her existence or perhaps a general combination of the two. Not exactly sure how to speak—because wasn’t Kay right, she was not, in fact, a true adult and found it impossible to talk to someone intolerable—so they stood in silence for, generally, too long a time.

“What do you want?” His tone was clipped and abrupt after the stretch of silence and nearly even had a lace of suspicion, as if she was a shady character for coming up to the _concession stand_. Her face must have given its pinched, affronted look when he sighed, “Listen, I’m not in the mood for,” he waved his hand flippantly between them, “whatever this is. The sooner you tell me what you want, the sooner you get to be rid of my general dark aura or whatever it is that offends you so much.”

_Ah, yes_ , she thought, his ‘ _dark aura_ ’ was offensive not the plenty of actually offensive things he had said to her and about her before. As it was, she was not in the mood for bickering either, so she gave a calm and unbothered, “Two hot chocolates.”

He gave her a single nod and went to the stack of Styrofoam cups—terrible for the environment, her moral compass cried—and the packets of hot chocolate mix. From her careful observation of the construction of said hot chocolates, he did not seem to have spit in the cups, and she relaxed a bit. She fished out four dollars from her pocket and held it out to him when he set the steaming cups on the counter before her. The money hung in the air for a second too long, and his eyes lazily flickered between the crumpled cash and her eyes. After a beat, he shook his head.

“Why not?” Rey blurted, perhaps ruder than intended, but it was curious behavior, and she didn’t like it when she couldn’t predict what someone was going to do.

“The school system takes enough of our money as it is, teachers drink hot chocolate free.”

Rey’s brain screamed for her to shut up and take her meager four dollars and planet-killing cups, but her social anxiety caused her critical thinking processes to short circuit, apparently, because she insisted on stating verbatim Kaydel’s earlier words, “But half the proceeds go to families affected by cancer in the community?”

“Rey,” his voice was gruff and unkind, “take the bleeding hot chocolate.”

“Take the bleeding money then,” there was only chaos and turmoil in her fickle, pea-sized single brain cell, and Rey wished nothing more than for the Earth to open wide and swallow her whole.

The money in question was wrenched with such intensity from her grip that a corner of a dollar fluttered to the ground, and Rey barely had time to process the interaction as he shoved the money in the school cash box. His eyes had rolled, his head had shaken, and his mouth was muttering strings of curses along the lines of ‘fucking ridiculous’ and ‘ _the_ most difficult.’ Naturally, Rey grabbed her cups and scurried as fast as possible away from the stand. Kaydel smiled.

“So, how was being an adult?”

“I never want to do it again.”

“Ah, the usual. What happened?”

“He,” Rey paused and took a sip of her hot chocolate, “tried to give it to me for free?”

Her eyebrow quirked in confusion, “Tried to? Did you not—”

“No, I didn’t, and it was horrible, and I don’t want to talk about it,” Rey rushed out in a single breath as she trekked towards Rose’s booth.

“So, he was being nice? And you rejected it?” Kaydel’s highly amused voice followed behind her.

“I don’t want to talk about it!”

* * *

The front office, after school hours on Thursdays specifically—because that was when Principal Snoke left early for meetings—was the ideal socializing spot. Rey, Finn, and Rose were all leaned against the front desk laughing at Mitaka, a small, skittish man with a very neat combover and color-coded pens. Mitaka put up with a lot, it seemed, being generally scared of anyone all the time and having to work in such close proximity to Snoke all day. The three of them weren’t teasing him per se, more so his paranoid glances around him as they surrounded him with mostly joking badmouthing of the person he was scared of most, second to Snoke, of course.

“Keep your voices down!” The man squeaked up at them from his spinney chair.

Finn put a hand on his shoulder and smirked, “Come on, Mitaka, it’s therapeutic. Say one bad thing about him. Just one. I know there’s _plenty_ of content to choose from.”

Rey’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. She and Finn had been—not _arguing_ —but there was a certain tension between them after the revelation of Poe’s personal life. They were rarely ever alone together, the tension unable to stand just the two of them at any given time. Thus, why she cherished the moments with the groups in the front office.

Rose cleared her throat after Mitaka blinked in silence, unamused at the three of them, “Here, I’ll set the example. Once, I walked into the teacher’s lounge to find him,” her hands raised and shook with the utmost melodrama in the air, “ _shaking_ the vending machine like a damn bear. I asked him if he was okay, and _he_ looked at _me_ like I was the one that was crazy.”

The mental image of him shaking a vending machine was awfully hard to picture, and it took a minute of focused thinking to bring it up. Ben Solo, vending machine-sized Ben Solo, battling it out with a vending machine. Stuck up, pretentious, only sneers at Rey, Ben Solo. Laughing was not difficult.

Finn had to stifle his chuckles into his fist all the while slapping the counter as Mitaka furrowed his bros in frustration at him. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m not, but, you know,” he took a steadying breath, smile still threatening to crack into full-blown laughter. “Once, a student told me that in the class before his, Solo had a writing workshop because he said a certain English teacher couldn’t teach them basic comma rules. The next class, someone told Hux, and he marched over to his class and asked to speak to him in the hall, and he just said no and kept teaching.”

“Good for him,” Rey chuckled, not Armitage Hux’s biggest fan either, and Mitaka gave a small, concealed smile with a duck of his head.

“C’mon, Rey. What’s your thing,” Finn said with a smirk.

Rose snorted and pitched in, “You must have _so many_ favorite things about him.”

“So many,” Rey grinned wolfishly, “let’s see, since there are _so many_ , I’ll just have to go with the most recent lovely thing about him.”

Finn gave a fancy gesture with his arm, “Well then, after you.”

Rey gave a mock bow with her head and a salute to Mitaka whose head was in his hands. “Most recently, is his bulletin board—”

“Is that a euphemism for something—”

“Rose!” Rey shouted, red-faced and appalled, “That’s disgusting, especially him of all people, no, I mean his actual bulletin board—the thing that hangs outside of classes. The thing that’s supposed to look fun?”

Finn nodded, “Ah, the bulletin board. What about it?”

With a groan, she stated, “It’s an absolute eyesore. No colors, nothing about the students, not technically anything about the class,” she smiled and leaned in, “nothing except for extra copies of his syllabus per class.”

Finn chuckled, “What for? In case someone regretted throwing the original in the garbage bin?”

Mitaka gave a small squeak of poorly contained horror as the only warning for Ben Solo’s sudden presence in the front office. Rey’s head jerked to look at him, where it seemed he had already been looking at her, and she gave a harsh swallow. He couldn’t have heard her. Surely not, she thought. Contrary to that conviction, however, his usual grumpy scowl was an amplified glowering, and she did not think she had ever seen him look so ill-tempered, which was certainly saying something.

“What?” He growled in response to the sudden staring contest between Finn, Rose, Mitaka, and Rey against him. Rey thought she detected a hint of a blush, but she couldn’t be sure, nor could she blame him. Overhearing insults or not, walking in and seeing a group of people stop talking to stare at you would be mortifying.

Mitaka stammered and tried to smile, “Afternoon, Solo—I mean Ben, Mr. Solo. Need anything?”

There was a horrific, wailing silence. Mitaka was putting on a brave smile though his hands were shaking, and Rey felt particularly bad for him considering what they had bene teasing him would not happen had, in fact, happened. Finn had pulled out his cell phone and pretended to be typing a very serious message to someone. From her vantage point, however, Rey could see that he was just tapping viciously at his lock screen. Rose kept darting glances over at Rey, and Rey really wished she would not because it only made Solo do the same with his withering glare.

At long last, he clipped, “No,” despite the paper that was in his hand, and he spun on his heels from the office. The door slammed and the hinges rattled on his way out, making Mitaka jump in his seat and for Finn to glance up from his phone with a grimace.

“Maybe,” Rose suggested with a sort of optimistic yet fatalistic tone but also a wince in her features, “he didn’t hear it?”

_Maybe he didn’t hear you_ , was the unspoken alternative to the sentence, Rey had the mortifying thought. Sure, Finn had been speaking technically last but…the insult was definitely on her. Not that she regretted gossiping about him exactly—nobody could be _that_ much of a supreme asshole and _not_ expect to be the subject of some gossip—but more so that he had witnessed it.

“He absolutely heard it and we’re all dead and it’s all of your faults,” Mitaka bemoaned into his hands which he had let his head fall into.

Finn snorted, looking a bit flustered, but he was never be one to be scared off by any bully, “I survived the military and the VA office. I can more than handle a moody 30-something emo.”

Rey bit her lip in thought. Sure, he certainly could, but he also didn’t have to teach in a secluded basement next to the said adult emo. He also wasn’t the one who insulted his bulletin board—and really, what a dumb topic to get offended about, Rey rationalized. Even if he heard it, there was no way he would be so immature that he would actually hold it as a grudge.

* * *

He had definitely heard her, and _for some reason_ , he had definitely taken issue with the matter.

She had been getting ready to leave for home when she heard his mutterings in the hallway, and she turned to peek in the hallway as her hand hoisted her teacher bag onto her shoulder. Rey watched Ben Solo stalk out of his classroom looking quite disgruntled as he carried decorative items—seemingly to hang up on his woefully uncreative bulletin board. She could hardly believe that he would listen to a word she said, especially those phrased as insults to him. Not one to stop herself from basking in victory ever but also hoping to perhaps apologize (even if she was right when she said it), Rey dropped her bag back to the floor to step into the hallway and watch his progress.

He had several pieces of colorful cardstock paper underneath his arm, and he wielded an unfolded stapler as a weapon, stapling the papers as a backdrop for the board with resounding aggression. The way his open palm smacked the stapler into the board made it seem as if the stapler had been the one to offend him deeply. She stifled a giggle as he stapled a green paper amidst several red ones.

“Going for a Christmas themed board, are you Mr. Solo?”

He jumped at her voice and turned to her looking much displeased. His mouth was in that ever-perpetual frown, his eyes were narrowed, and his brow was drawn tight together in a fearsome grimace. However, the same hatred he’d expressed in his glaring looks in the office earlier were, thankfully, not present. Perhaps, Rey wondered, the acts of aggression against the innocent stapler were therapeutic.

“What do you mean,” he grumbled, “it’s red for America. You called it an eyesore, and I’ve made an attempt to,” he waved a loose hand in its direction, “do something about it.”

Rey nodded with a smile, pointing to the lone green sheet, “What about that splotch of green there?”

He blinked and stared at it for a long time. “Is it green?” He asked after a lengthy silence.

Her amusement was abated by curiosity, “Most definitely. Are you color blind? I’m sorry to have teased if so, I wouldn’t have if I’d known.”

He ripped off the paper startlingly sudden and continued to grumble, “I’m not color blind. My mistake.”

His behavior was more odd than usual, Rey had to admit, and almost worrisomely so.

“Okay, um, sorry also for earlier—my _suggestion_ —it wasn’t exactly phrased constructively.”

It almost seemed as if he was too tired to have his usual brand of nasty wittiness aimed at her expense, and he sighed with a hand rubbing at one of his eyes. “I get it. I’m a terrible teacher who cares nothing about his students if I don’t make an effort with a bulletin board regardless of creative ability. You made your point already.”

Rey winced, and she almost gave into the urge to put a hand on his arm—maker only knew why she would have done that, it would be a cold day in hell before she felt sorry for pompous arse Solo. “That’s _not_ what I said—”

Something seemed to overwhelm him then, and the papers slipped from his fingers as he squeezed his eyes shut. His hand, emptied of the papers, pinched the bridge of his nose, and Rey realized he hadn’t been narrowing his eyes at all but rather squinting. The behavior was somewhat similar to when he had been in the concession stand at the football game—only more somehow, like whatever had been causing him to grumble then had intensified.

“Forget it,” he forced out through clenched teeth.

“Ben, are you alright?” It struck Rey that this was the first time she had ever called him by his name before, but she supposed it was not really noteworthy and discarded the thought for more important things.

His voice was pinched and pained, and he leaned against the wall, stapler in his other hand clacking against the concrete blocks, “Fine, just a headache is all.”

She did touch his shoulder then, and his eyes flew open to look down at her as she spoke, “You don’t seem fine, maybe you should sit—”

He ripped away from her touch and tore at the papers he’d stapled to the bulletin board. Most of them had been stapled and then ripped in such a way that he left the board looking like it had been mauled by an animal, nothing but tattered remains left in the wake of the attack. He then shakily—Rey was alarmed to see his hands had a distinct tremor in them—bent to pick up the papers he’d dropped, and he snarled, “ _Forget it, Rey_.”

He stole away from the hallway and slammed his classroom door with brute force, and Rey was left in the hallway feeling an unsettling concoction of hurt and concern. For _Ben Solo_ of all people in the world.

A week passed where Rey could see the remnants of paper bits on his board from across the hall—bits he made no move to take down—and she made no move to apologize for… _whatever_ it was she had done wrong, if there even was such an instance. Sometimes, Rey would spot him with his signature narrowed-eyed look, and where her reaction before had been that he was a miserable twat, it morphed into realization that perhaps he was in pain. Physical pain. The realization did not make him any less of an asshole—his sour expression was one thing, but his insults of her character and dismissal of her very existence was quite another—but it took some of the fight out of her. It was hard to stay righteously infuriated with someone whom you pitied, and she did pity him. Many of his faults were his own, such as why he had no friends to visit him in the basement, but Rey wasn’t heartless, and she pitied him still. _A cold day in hell before she felt sorry for a pompous arse like Solo_ , indeed.

She wanted to speak to him, not to apologize, she had decided. There were certain items she wished to clarify in her grievances with him. His words had been ringing in her head for a week about how she viewed him as an uncaring and cruel teacher, which simply was not true. Rey was adamant that she disliked him in an entirely unprofessional capacity—it had nothing to do with his work, and everything to do with the fact that he belittled her and her goals and her degree and generally everything about her. Also, the matter of being too hard on his students, but even then the students she shared with him for the most part actually liked him as a teacher and would note that he cared that they learned in his class, they just hated his class and the workload with a stinging ferocity.

(It would be important to note that Rey condemned gossiping about her coworkers with the children in her classroom, however, every single student knew about the “feud” between Ms. Niima and Mr. Solo and liked to drop testers to see how she would respond.)

The problem was that Rey was nervous. The last time she had thought to cross the hallway and speak with her coworker had been, needless to say, a disaster. The opportunity for another attempt presented itself on Rey’s couch on a Saturday night. She was hosting Rose for popcorn, edible cookie dough (though Rey had insisted to Rose that she didn’t mind the risk of salmonella which warranted a scolding from her new friend), and a movie which Rose had insisted was a romcom but actually turned out to be thought-provoking and made Rey cry.

With the movie’s bittersweet piano-playing and credits rolling in the background with Rey’s sniffles joining into the melody, Rose turned face Rey on the couch. She sighed.

“Thanks so much for agreeing to this, after my meeting with Snoke on Friday, I really needed it,” Rose frowned, “he’s a real prick.”

“Of course,” Rey sniffled into a tissue and gave a playful swat to Rose’s shoulder, “I’m sure making me weep like a child makes you feel better.”

Rose tilted her head back in laughter, and Rey smiled. “I swear I remembered it being funnier, I didn’t mean to make you sad!”

Rey shook her head, smiling into her wet sleeve, “Sure, it was sweet too I guess. Mostly sweet. Anyway, what did the world’s creepiest principal do this time?”

Rose groaned and rolled her eyes, “You know the student government is putting on the homecoming dance right?”

“I do.”

“Well, now it might not happen.”

Rey sat up, eyebrows furrowed, “What? Why? He can’t really cancel it, can he?”

Rose bit her cheek and sighed through her nose, “He can, and he said he would. Apparently, there’s a rule—which has never been a rule before, mind you—that there has to be a male chaperone at the dance.”

“Well, that’s dumb, but what’s the problem? There’s plenty of _males_ to be chaperones.”

Rose nodded, “That would be true but it’s Finn and Poe’s anniversary, and they’re going out of town.”

“Oh,” Rey frowned. Finn hadn’t mentioned he was going out town. She supposed, once again, she was not his keeper and wasn’t required to know his every intent. It would have been nice to have been kept in the loop like Rose apparently was, however. “So that leaves?”

“Mitaka, Beaumont, Hux, or Ben.”

“What about Mitaka? He’s nice,” Rey suggested.

“Snoke said he’d prefer someone with a degree,” Rose grumbled with a shake of her head, “elitist piece of—”

“Well, Beaumont? I know he’s kind of the worst but—”

“I _really_ don’t want to ask him,” she moaned holding her head in her hands, “he’s been trying to get involved in SGA for years, and he’s always giving me _helpful tips_ about how to run _my_ club. I don’t want to give him any ideas so—”

“So that leaves you with the two biggest assholes in the school—”

“But Hux will say no, like he always does. He doesn’t participate in anything, and then there’s Solo who’ll probably just kick me out of his classroom because I’m friends with you now, who he hates I guess—”

“Thanks,” Rey snorted.

“You know what I mean. So, I don’t know what to do. I already have a non-refundable down payment on a DJ with the school’s money.”

A thought popped into her head, “If I could get Ben to agree, would that be who you’d pick?”

Rose mulled it over, nodding, “Ideally. He’s just a little less of a rude piece of work than Hux. He also wouldn’t try to take over or take credit for Kaydel and I’s work like Beaumont would. Yeah, sure, _if_ you could get him to do it, I’d be ecstatic,” she shook her head with a skeptical smile, “but you couldn’t get him to do it.”

Rey smirked, “Want to bet on it?”

“Alright,” Rose dropped her smile, “did Finn not tell you about the anniversary trip?’

“No,” Rey flushed and looked away, “things are sort of weird right now between us. He must have forgotten to mention it.”

Rose laid a comforting hand to her shoulder, “I know. Poe should have mentioned you were, you know, teaching his kid. It put you in a weird position.”

She shrugged, “I don’t even care really. I just thought Poe and I were making progress—we never really got on too well when he and Finn were dating, you know. And, you know, maybe we weren’t exactly _best friends_ or anything, but I would have thought he would have mentioned he was a _father_ and now Finn, my actual best friend and brother, is basically a step-father—”

“Bea’s mother has full custody, if that makes you feel any better. She stays over sometimes, and Poe’s obviously not neglectful as a father, but Finn doesn’t really have anything to do with raising her.”

“I guess that makes me feel better,” Rey shrugged again, thoroughly displeased with the turn the conversation had taken, “it just feels like maybe these were things he could have trusted me enough to tell me himself.”

“I know,” Rose leaned in to hug her, and Rey was overwhelmed by the sudden feeling of gratefulness that she had a friend like her to vent to. It had only ever been Finn before, and sometimes, when she needed to vent _about_ Finn, the only person she ever had was her adoptive mother, which wasn’t really the same. Maz liked to give her sage and seasoned advice, which Rey appreciated, but sometimes she just needed someone to hug her and tell her that her feelings were valid.

* * *

“Alright, here’s the deal,” Rey stood in Ben Solo’s classroom, arms crossed, door closed (to avoid another catastrophe like the last time), daring him to kick her out.

Ben scoffed and leaned back in his chair, “I haven’t agreed to any sort of deal, but sure, invite yourself in while I’m working, and by all means, pull up a chair.”

Rey gave a deceiving sweet smile, and she pulled a chair out from under a student’s chair and sat it in front of his desk. She knew damn well he did not actually mean for her to do anything of the sort. In fact, from his affronted expression and deadpan gaze, he had actually said ‘get lost’ but Rey had a mission to complete and a bet to win.

“I want to call a truce.”

“A truce?” He seemed unconvinced of her sincerity and intentions, which she could hand to him, she understood.

“Yes,” Rey straightened her posture and smoothed out her skirt over her knees, “it doesn’t do us any good to show all our students how much we hate each other, it’s unprofessional—”

“Speak for yourself, if you will, I don’t hate you,” there was a curious glint in his eyes and tilt in his head.

Rey snorted, “Sure you don’t, anyway—”

“Come on,” he splayed his hands on his desk as if he were metaphorically laying all his cards on the table, so to speak, “you declare we should call a truce, but you won’t take me at my word when I say something true. I don’t hate you. If you want a truce as you say, you can hate me all you want, but if you want peace to last, let’s not be hypocrites, shall we?”

She paused for a second, nodded, and continued, “Alright, sorry then—”

“Apology accepted.”

“Stop interrupting me,” she snapped, and he leaned back again, _smirking_. “Anyhow, I don’t hate you either, and I don’t think you’re a bad teacher or whatever it is you think that I think. To be very clear, I dislike you because you’re rude and antagonistic, but that isn’t a hating offense.”

“I appreciate your honesty.”

“I _don’t_ appreciate your sarcasm,” her mouth thinned, and he only continued smirking. “Like I said, it doesn’t do to have our students _think_ that we hate one another, so I have a proposition.”

“I’m listening,” there was a slight lilt in his voice as if he were cajoling her, and the twinkle in his eyes agreed. Stars, maybe she hated him after all.

“Rose needs a male chaperone for the homecoming dance.”

“Since when was that a rule?” He frowned.

“Since Snoke decided so,” Rey answered with a flat tone, glad at least that it seemed even he thought the rule was ridiculous, “some sort of show of power, micromanaging, I don’t know. Either way, will you do it?”

“Why don’t you get one of the Damerons, your _friends_ , to do it. I’m sure they would be much more enthusiastic volunteers,” he suggested, sounding bored.

“She would if they weren’t celebrating their anniversary. As I’m sure you can understand, that leaves very few desirable options.”

“Does that make me a desirable option then?”

Rey rolled her eyes, “Don’t flatter yourself. A tolerable option.”

He nodded, “Fair enough. Now since this is a proposition as you say, what’s in it for me?”

“What do you mean? It’s a truce. We stop antagonizing each other and have some blessed peace from curious students.”

“I could just stop antagonizing you now and not have to attend a dance where I’d have to pry apart grinding teenagers, so why should I agree to anything extra?”

Rey glared and rolled her eyes for the second time, “Fine. What can I do for you, Mr. Solo?”

He smiled, and she could almost believe that it was genuine, close-lipped as it was, “Decorate my bulletin board, and we have a deal.”

“That’s it?” Rey blinked in surprise, “You just want me decorate your board? Not—I don’t know—publicly declare that history is superior or grovel before you or do all your paper copies for a month? Just the board?”

He nodded, “Your _suggestion_ , non-constructive though it had been, had a point. You’re the artistic one in this basement, so you decorate it as you see fit. That way, I look like a more involved teacher, and you don’t have to look across the hall and see a—what did you say? —an eyesore?”

Rey blushed in memory of how mortifying it was to have him overhear her words, “Alright, I suppose that’s not too painful.”

“And—”

“There’s an ‘and’ to this?” Rey cried.

“ _And_ you have to chaperone the dance as well. It won’t do to have a truce and not have the students see it at work. Ideally, we attend, we chaperone, I say some inane pleasantry to you, you return the favor, and the students stop gossiping.”

“I was already going,” Rey sniffed, conceding that he did, in fact, have a point.

“Glad to hear it,” he smiled and stuck out his hand across his desk, “we have a deal then?”

Rey stood and took his hand, shaking it, and added, “A truce.”

“A truce,” he repeated, tipping his head to her in acknowledgement, warm hand still pressing into her own.

Belatedly, after the shaking had already stopped, Rey pulled her hand away from his and looked away from his sharp gaze. Busying herself, she placed the chair she had pulled back into its original spot. Without looking back at him, though knowing he was still watching her with intent, she gave a quiet, “Have a good evening, Ben,” and scampered back out of his classroom.


	4. The Bulletin Board

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A school-sponsored dance and what Rey would personally describe in her professional artist opinion as an artistic masterpiece.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi I'm so sorry it's been 5000 years. Writing during a pandemic is? Is not easy apparently? Anyway... :) hello I am back

“Do you like him now or something?”

Rey blinked and smiled at her student, not letting anything slip, “Mr. Solo’s let me convince him to decorate his bulletin board, so I offered to help out for creative purposes. Don’t tell him what I’m asking though,” she gave a conspiratorial wink, “let it be a surprise, eh?”

“Sure, Ms. Niima,” the student said with a skeptical drawl, but the students she shared with the APUSH class answered her questions all the same.

Did Ben Solo really deserve a surprise, thoughtful bulletin board from her? Well, after the past week, Rey figured he actually did—begrudgingly so. What Rey had expected from Ben’s reluctant involvement in the homecoming dance was just that, _reluctance_. His only agreed upon responsibilities were signing that he would be present and then, in fact, doing the showing up part. Rose, Rey, and Kaydel had not at all expected for him to attend the week-before meeting or for him to insist on being financially responsible for a portion of the out-of-pocket charges that were necessary for the decorations. He took note of what he needed to buy and bought it and said he would be there after school to help set up the decorations with the rest of them. Needless to say, they were astonished. Sure, he wasn’t exactly happy to do it—he was still himself as always—but the fact that he did any of it at all was nothing short of a miracle.

During her free period, she wrote several lesson plans before getting bored and flipped to a half-finished page in one of her (many) sketchpads. Passing time until the bell rang to signal the end of classes for the day, she jotted down ideas and sketches for the bulletin board. Solo had better be appreciative, an annoyed thought passed her by. She was putting more detail and attention into _his_ than she had into _hers_. It was almost finished, really. She had all her quotes, all her materials, the sketches were finished—she just kept adding more. Ten minutes after the bell had rung, Rey delighted in packing up her things early and stepped into the hallway. She would be making her way to the school gym, where the dance would be taking place after the homecoming game and where the band of teachers and the student government would be decorating in preparation. Why they didn’t just hold the dance on Saturday instead of starting closer to midnight, Rey could not say, but it was Rose’s event and Rey was staying quiet and supportive of her new friend. The second she set foot in the hallway, her basement neighbor and truce-mate toed out of his classroom as well. They both stopped for a minute and stared at one another, then he shrugged and turned to walk down the hallway, most likely walking in the same direction as her. Rey stared at his back as he walked away, but then he abruptly stopped and looked at her over his shoulder. There was something lighter in his features than she was used to seeing of him, and she thought he might have been smiling.

“Coming?” He asked her.

“Oh,” she raised her eyebrows in surprise and scurried to catch up with him, “yeah.”

They fell into stride together, up the stairs that led to the ground floor and out the doors and across the sidewalk to the gym building. It was silent and might have been awkward, but Rey wasn’t sure. There was none of the tension that silence usually held, and though they weren’t speaking and though a little over a week ago they were enemies and rivals, it was an almost companionable walk to their mutual destination. Upon arrival, the other two teacher chaperones caught eye contact. Kaydel, friendly as ever, waved at the pair of them from her spot crouched next to boxes containing decorations. Rose was warier of the person Rey had brought with her—smile not quite reaching her eyes—but Rey knew her to be mostly grateful.

Rey made a new discovery about Rose in her time helping set up for the dance—stress had the power of turning her friend into something just slightly off from a drill sergeant. Rose was never anything but her kind self, but there was a certain edge to her voice and an almost glint of excitement when she got to delegate tasks. She was also incredibly nervous and changed her mind about most every delegation she gave. Once everybody was more or less done, Rey caught the tail end of a conversation with Rose and Ben. Ben had been commanded, as the tallest person in the room, to hang leaf decorations on the walls of the gym. Apparently, Rose had gotten it into her head that the gym would be too dark, and Ben needed to go _back_ around the entirety of the gym’s perimeter to hang fairy lights. Biting the inside of her cheek in a twist about how the grump might react, she turned around, but all Rey saw was a tic in his jaw. Otherwise, he bit his tongue and nodded. She sighed; he deserved a state-of-the-art bulletin board at that point.

The students began to file out of the gym with a little over two hours until kickoff. There was nothing else anyone could do until the night was well in swing, and Rey was lingering behind as she saw that perhaps that was not true for everyone. Ben still had half a gym’s walls full of twinkle lights to cover.

Kaydel bumped into her with her hip and a grin, “See you at the game?”

“Maybe,” Rey shrugged and looked at her feet, “I know it’s homecoming, but I might just skip the bloodbath and head straight for the twinkle lights at midnight.”

Kay chuffed a laugh, “Fair enough. You walking out to your car?” She glanced around the almost empty gym, “I see Rose has abandoned us.”

Rey smiled shook her head, nodding toward Ben’s unassuming place on a ladder, “I think I’ll see if he needs any help.”

A pause of shock and then she was winking at Rey, “How adult of you,” she smirked and sauntered away.

Rey rolled her eyes and walked over to the only other gym occupant. He must have known she had come to stand next to him because without even having to glance down at her, his concentrated frown turned into a more annoyed one. The effect of said frown was heavily dampened by the fact that he was holding twinkle lights in his mouth to free up hand space.

“Why?” It sounded like what Ben was trying to say, but with the lights in his mouth, it sounded closer to, “wha?" 

“Thought you might want help, might make it go faster,” she looked up at him even as he stoically hang the lights into place.

He harrumphed and took one of his feet off to step down a rung in order to move the ladder over. Instead, his foot missed the rung and his hands were too full to steady himself and the ladder. Without even thinking about it, Rey rushed forward to prevent a slow and terrible collapse by holding the ladder—and by extension, his legs—to steady it for him. Seeming surprised, and mouth still holding the lights, Ben’s eyes slowly blinked down at her. Rey realized the precarious position she was in—pressed into his side with her arms nearly wrapped around the backs of his thighs—she jumped away and coughed, looking at the exit to hide her blush.

“‘anks,” Ben slurred.

“Right, so, want me to hold something for you?”

Some sort of mischievous glint shone in his eyes before he let the coil of lights fall from his lips, and they crashed into the ladder before smacking the floor. Unamused and slightly disgusted, Rey raised a brow.

“Please,” Ben smirked and made his way down the ladder and moved it to the side.

Sniffing but holding her tongue—because _truce_ , she had to remind herself—she picked up the lights as if they were diseased. All the same she uncoiled them and handed them to him as needed. For a time, they worked in conjunction with one another, moving the ladder several more times before Rey lost the nerve to maintain the awkward yet peaceful silence.

“So,” she trailed and unraveled another coil of fairy lights for him to tack into place, “what landed you in the basement?”

“What do you mean?” He asked without looking at her, plucking the lights from her outstretched hand.

She huffed a laugh, “You know what I mean. Snoke can’t cut art so he’ll make it miserable for whatever art teacher he’s landed with, you know, _throw them in the dungeon_ style. What’s your capital offense?”

He sighed and stepped down the ladder, only barely sparing her a glance as they moved in sync to the side, “I suppose it would be bad test scores and too much time off.”

“You?” Rey deadpanned, highly amused, “ _You_ had bad test scores and took time off?”

“Only last year,” his voice almost sounded pained, and she inwardly chuckled at how his pride was likely wounded by the implication that he would _ever_ be guilty of the things he said he was—and then to admit it to her of all people. “It was a bad year—personally, I mean—I let it conflict with work, which I never should have done and when I took time off it was personal days that I saved up on, but you don’t exactly just get to use them whenever you want or feel like you need to. Lights?”

His palm was faced up to receive the next foot of lights, and Rey hastened to put it there, brow furrowing as she considered his words, “Why not? I mean, if there’s an emergency or you have to focus on something personal and important, at the end of the day, it’s a job and you shouldn’t put it in front of,” she struggled to find the right word, “yourself or whatever it was for you.”

“Not when you’re an educator. It’s not like walking into an office and sticking the finger to some heartless corporate asshole,” he shook his head, and she couldn’t help but notice the way a lock of his ridiculously nice, long hair fell in front of his eyes at the motion, “you work for the students and if you’re not teaching, they aren’t learning. It can affect the way they understand future subjects. Having a bad teacher can even ruin subjects or the way they view school and, you know,” he shrugged as if it wasn’t a very big deal when it was obvious that, to him, it very much was, “it’s important.”

Rey blinked at the voice that went into his explanation. She was beginning to see how her criticisms of him as a teacher must have put him on the defensive in their first argument because it was clear he really did care about the students and teaching. What did she know anyway? Anyone could see she never got an education degree and probably never intended to teach—and it was true. Of course, his responses were out of line by a very wide margin but looking a month and a half back to the matter, she was embarrassed of it.

“Right. That’s true,” she smiled and tried to steer the conversation away from her own insecurities and failings as a new teacher, “So, bad test scores, is that why you’re so hard on the students this year? No offense to your teaching methods, of course,” she finished with what she hoped was a playful smirk.

Ben shrugged and strung up more lights, “Partially, I suppose I’d be lying if I said it didn’t play some part, but I’ve always held the A.P. students to a higher standard though. I do want them to pass the exam at the end. It’s college credit,” he looked at her and smiled if only a very small smile, “which, of course, you know already since you have your own A.P. class. But I want them to get the credit at the end, get whatever advantage they can—college is expensive, I’m sure I don’t have to say that twice to you.”

She laughed a bit in spite of herself and her looming student loans, “Expensive is sugarcoating it honestly,” back to moving the ladder, he nodded emphatically with a weary smile as she spoke, “but anyway, I guess making sure the students have better test scores also doesn’t hurt if it gets you out of the basement sooner, right?”

He shrugged again and looked less than impressed as he mounted the ladder once more, “Honestly? I don’t mind it that much,” he chuckled when he looked down at her shocked expression, “sure, it’s disgusting and dark, I’ll give you that, but you haven’t had a classroom close to the main office before. It has its own set of horrors—more fights in the hallways to break up, Hux, _Principal Snoke_.”

“Are you scared of Snoke?”

“Of course, why the surprise? Aren’t you?”

He was looking fully at her now, waiting for a response, not distracting himself with his task, and she shrugged her shoulders in a jerky, disbelieving fashion, “Well, I mean, of course _I_ am, but I’m not _you_.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, you’re,” she used a hand to gesture up and down as to the tallness of his frame, “ _tall_ and,” she circled her hand in front of his pensive expression, “ _brooding_ —”

“I’m flattered,” he interjected, biting back a cheeky grin.

“I never specified that was necessarily a good thing,” she rolled her eyes and flushed, slapping a string of lights into his hand, “I just mean, I don’t understand why _you_ would be afraid of an emaciated, old, bald man.”

“Snoke,” he paused and looked over her shoulder. When she turned and gazed up she saw a small, unassuming security camera, the same ones all over the school (except for the basement because why waste money on monitoring a place nobody really goes to). His voice was at muttering level when he spoke again, facing the wall instead, “he isn’t a good man.”

“Of course he isn’t. I’m just surprised it affects you is all.”

Ben shook his head and a smirk slid onto his face, “Would it surprise you to know that _you_ scare me?”

“ _Me_?”

He nodded in false solemnity, “Oh, yes. You, a complete stranger, just waltzed into my classroom and told me everything I was doing wrong—I mean, the sheer confidence that that has. You’re clearly an extravert and I confess,” he looked at her as he grabbed another string of lights, “I’ve never met an extravert that I didn’t fear if only a bit.”

Rey spluttered, laughing in disbelief, “An _extravert?_ Absolutely not! Do you even realize how much I had to mentally prepare myself for that encounter?”

“Oh please,” he rolled his eyes, but she could tell it was in jest.

She sniffed, “The concept may be unfamiliar to you, but you _can_ still be an introvert with social skills, you know?”

He nodded, “That’s true, but you can also be an extravert with social anxiety.”

“That’s contradictory,” she negated.

“Not really. You can still enjoy the company of people and enjoy meeting new people, but still worry over the particulars of it.”

He was right, but Rey was not about to get in the habit of conceding to him just because they were in a truce, “I suppose that could be true, but I still think I know myself better than you do.”

His resulting smirk was infuriating, and she would have retorted had he not nodded to small stretch of wall they had left to cover and dismissed her, “I’m just about done, you can go on.”

“Are you sure?” Rey was… _definitely_ not about to admit it to herself that she had actually been _enjoying_ their conversation.

“Yeah, I promise not to get into any ladder-related injuries that would keep me from chaperoning,” she laughed at his attempt at humor and nodded, stepping away.

“You’d better not or the truce is off, and we will have no choice but to go back to yelling at each other.”

He _tsked_ against his teeth and went back to finishing the job, “We couldn’t have that.”

* * *

In hindsight, Rey should have realized that skipping the football game itself caused her chances of being late to the resulting dance to multiply tenfold. She was doing her best to not completely stumble out of her car, which she figured would look mildly alarming to students or various sorts of onlookers. All the same, she took her heels off to drive and when she got out, she hopped on one while she shut her door and simultaneously slipped on the other. Her tardiness was most likely not a great deal, but she hurried to the gym all the same looking red-faced and flustered. Immediately upon walking in, she was assaulted by dim lighting and loud voices and pounding music and also her small friend.

Rose was beaming up at her, and Rey hastened to say, “I’m so sorry for being late! Is everything going well?”

“Well?” Rose laughed and gestured to the room, “It’s great, and I honestly owe you a life debt.”

“Why’s that?”

“Look,” she pointed over to a section of the room, snickering. A grumpy-looking Mr. Solo was standing off to the side with his arms crossed over his chest, and the students were giving him a wide berth. “Get this: Solo’s scowl makes everyone so uncomfortable that I haven’t had to pull a single pair of students from grinding on each other yet.”

Rey’s eyebrows rose, “I remember my high school dances, that’s fairly impressive of him.”

“It’s delightful, a miracle even,” Rose nodded.

Rey made eye contact with Kaydel who was manning the punch station. Her friend grinned and dropped the spoon blindly into the punch bowl, and Rey grimaced as she watched the handle slip beneath the juice concoction while Kay made her way over.

“You look fantastic!”

“Not _too_ fantastic, I hope,” Rey gave a modest blush, “I don’t want to look like I’m trying to impress high schoolers.”

“No, of course, not. You look appropriately and professionally fantastic,” Kay winked.

Over her friend’s head of blonde hair, she caught the eye of Finn’s fellow JROTC instructor, Jannah. She smiled and waved before she realized that Jannah wasn’t looking at her at all but rather her shorter friend stood next to her. All this Kaydel witnessed with a knowing look and a wicked grin.

“Jannah again, Rose?”

Rose’s blush and averted gaze spoke enough for her and Kay leaned into Rey’s space to whisper in confidence, “She’s been waving at Rose all night long and Rose _still_ hasn’t gone over to speak to her.”

“I have nothing interesting to say!”

“You don’t have to say anything! You’re clearly the most interesting thing in the room to her currently.”

Rose bit her lip and wrung her hands together, “You think?”

Rey smiled, “Kay’s right. Just go over there and see what happens.”

A long stretch of silence ensued with the two of them staring down an increasingly brave Rose. At long last, she gave a deep sigh or calming breath and moved across the room without a word to them—two self-satisfied smirks following her all the way. Rose had just reached Jannah’s side when Rey got a buzz from her phone. When she opened the text from Finn, it was a picture of Poe pretending to be Rose from Titanic on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, feet planted at the tip of the upper deck and arms stretched to greet the mist of water. Distantly, she could hear Kaydel gasping about students dipping their cups into the punch bowl in lieu of a ladle and scurrying off.

“You should’ve pushed him,” Rey responded to the text along with several laughing emojis that physically pained her to use for the cringiness of them, but she feared if she didn’t use them then Finn might be able to guess that she actually _wouldn’t_ have minded if he had pushed Poe off the boat, and she was doing her best to not come across as a frigid bitch.

She did not recognize that Kaydel had left her side in favor of operating a sanitary rescue mission for the ladle stuck in the punch bowl until she looked up from her phone and tucked it back into the pocket of her dress slacks. Rose and Jannah were laughing and chatting across the room and though Rey knew logically none of the students cared about her when they were too busy having youthful fun, but she felt awkward and alone and as if she were in high school again alone in an antisocial corner of her own making. Her gaze made its way to the only other unoccupied person in the room and the person in question happened to glance at her at just the same time. Ben dropped his edgy scowl for that awkward and thin-lipped smile that white people give each other in passing as well as a shrug. Rey sighed and made her way towards him.

For a moment they stood shoulder to shoulder—or rather shoulder to the mid-bicep region given that he was two heads taller than her—and stoically looked at the crowd, speaking not a word. After a couple deafening minutes of silence despite the fact that the school-hired DJ was systematically murdering everyone’s eardrums with school appropriate music of the rap genre, Ben was the first to speak.

“Lovely weather we’re having.”

Rey crumpled her brow and looked at him with a funny expression, “We’re inside.”

Ben smiled just slightly and looked at his shoes, “I was merely satirizing meaningless small talk.”

“Who uses ‘merely’ outside of…like,” she struggled to come to a sensible time frame, “the 1800s?”

“I do.”

“Clearly,” Rey laughed in spite of herself and there was a pause in which she could admit to herself that she was rather enjoying talking to him and didn’t feel nearly as uncomfortable being around him as she might have a week prior, “Listen, I’ve been thinking—”

“Good lord,” his sarcastic quip was rather quick on the uptake.

“ _Hush_ ,” Rey laughed a bit louder, which she noticed actually turned a couple heads of students around them, “now—”

“Did you just tell me to hush?”

“Yes! I’ve been thinking.”

“So you’ve claimed,” she hit him on the shoulder which released a small laugh from him and prompted him to concede, “go on then, you were _thinking_.”

Rey sniffed with feigned indignance, “Well, I was going to say that we should probably be friends, but you apparently don’t think me even capable of _thought_ —”

“I was _merely_ teasing,” he said with a crooked grin, “so why should we be friends?”

“Is it so hard to imagine?”

He shrugged, “No, but you said you’d been thinking, so I assumed there was more.”

“Does there have to be?”

“No, but there is, isn’t there?”

Rey rolled her eyes despite the amused grin on her face, “I was only going to point out that we should probably have each other’s backs as the bottom of the metaphorical school totem pole—the basement dwellers.”

Ben pretended to mull the thought over in his head, “That depends, do I have to pay a union fee?”

“Maybe sometimes a companionable lunch break between colleagues could be accepted as payment?”

“I thought we were discussing friendship not colleagueship.”

“Well then fine, a lunch break between friends.”

“Well then I accept.”

“Excellent,” Rey smiled and bounced a bit on her toes before catching a few eyes from her students, “We’re attracting a bit of attention.”

“That is the point isn’t it?”

Rey nodded and a bit of awkward silence settled between the two of them, but she could see him biting his cheek to keep his face from twisting into a smile. Then he let out of a bit of a sigh, “Look, since we’re _friends_ now—or anti-basement unionists, alternatively—I probably owe you an apology. Or more than one.”

“You owed me one whether we were friends or not—”

“Nothing I said to you was true, or at least I don’t actually believe any of it. I was projecting a bit, and it was a bad day,” he slid his hands in his pockets and looked at his dress shoes.

“Uh-huh, and which argument is this?”

“The first, of course.”

“Ah,” she ribbed him and said with a teasing tone, “so you _do_ believe kids should have dreams.”

He frowned, and she regretted her choice of words, hoping she hadn’t said something offensive and taken them a month back in time, but he nodded, “I do, and for the record as well, I don’t think art is a useless subject. I’m fond of it actually.”

Rey smiled and bit back the tease she would have made over his use of the word ‘fond’ outside of the Downton Abbey set and instead inquired, “Do you do any art?”

“I used to. If calligraphy counts.”

“Of course it counts. I’d love to see it sometime if you ever wanted to share.”

“Maybe,” he smiled and ducked his head a bit, “and contrary to what our animosity might suggest, I think you’re a fine teacher.”

“Thanks, Ben,” she beamed up at him.

With a bit of a scare on Rey’s part, Kaydel came from seemingly nowhere and clamped her hand around Rey’s arm, “The punch ran out, so I am free from its responsibilities, want to dance?”

“Are we allowed to dance?”

“Of course,” Kay gestured to Jannah and Rose off to the side of the room lightly bobbing to the music and laughing together, “just keep it PG and don’t dance with the actual students.”

“Alright,” Rey shrugged and looked back at Ben with what she surmised was likely a look of _I have no choice in this matter_.

Kay turned back, grinning to Ben, “Oh, sorry, did you want to join?”

He smiled, “I’m honored, but I’m afraid I still have a sinister reputation to maintain.”

“That, you do,” Rey laughed and allowed herself to be led away by her friend.

As they were walking away, Kay excitedly whispered into her ear, “You two were getting on rather well?”

* * *

It was four-thirty in the evening on the Monday after homecoming weekend, and Rey was finally putting together the bulletin board to shame all other bulletin boards. She’d already had all her materials cut out and arranged how she wanted them to go on and all that was left to do was to pin and tack them on. Rey could already admit that her designs were fairly impressive before she even began putting them up and seeing the half-finished project pinned in place had her excited to be able to give the final reveal to its intended recipient. Said recipient was just beyond the wall she was tacking things onto. From bullying (or talking very persuasively) Mitaka into showing what time he usually signed out from the office, Rey knew Ben Solo to very rarely leave before six o’clock. Just in case, Rey had poked her head into his room to tell him that under penalty of certain death he was disallowed from leaving his room until she said so. He’d mock saluted her and stuffed his bemused grin back into the pile of essays he was grading.

With only a few more decorations to put into place, Rey heard footsteps making their way down the stairs. With a slight glance she watched Poe bound down the steps and wave at her from down the hall. Rey’s stomach dropped and she offered an uncomfortable wave, turned back to her task at hand, and prayed that he was down there to speak to Solo for some convoluted reason.

“Hey,” he came to stand next to her, and her shoulders sagged.

“Hey,” was her mousy quiet response, “how was New York?”

“Oh, um, it was,” she could see him rock back and forth on his heels looking just as uncomfortable to be talking to her without Finn present as she was to him, “it was great.”

“Great.”

A nauseating and horrific silence stretched and scraped between them, the feeling it caused akin to watching a car crash in slow motion and having to cringe for a much more significant period of time than is natural for the human nerves.

Poe tried for the pleasantries the same as she had and gestured with a jerky motion towards her very concentrated work, “That’s coming together nice. Did you, ah, did you draw those yourself?”

The words and confidence left and filled her body without a moment’s thought as she whirled on him, “Why didn’t you tell me you had a daughter?”

His eyes closed and he blew out a breath as if he’d been holding one, “Right. That’s what I came here to talk about.”

“Yeah, let’s talk about that.”

“Listen,” his hand went to lay itself on her shoulder, but at the last second he stopped and left it hovering before abandoning the thought altogether, “you know we never really got on when Finn and I started dating and obviously still to this day. At the beginning, even though we didn’t really like one another, I just didn’t want my boyfriend’s best friend to have anything concrete against me besides our generally…clashing personalities.”

The feeling was like a slow, deliberate (though she knew Poe was only telling the truth) plunge of a knife through her ribs, “How is that relevant?”

“I knocked a girl up in high school, Rey. It doesn’t paint a very flattering picture. Might I add in again: a girl. It was not my gayest moment. Then I would also have had to explain how she has full custody which looks a bit like I’m a deadbeat who can’t take care of his kid. I just didn’t want you to have a real reason to disapprove of me.”

“I understand,” she said quietly after a moment of letting his words permeate the air. It hurt very deeply that he thought so lowly of her that he didn’t think she could handle hearing that he was a teen dad without shaming him, but she would never let him know that. “I just would have preferred a warning at least.”

Poe’s face was solemn and regretful, “You’re absolutely right, I should have told you. It made things a lot weirder than they needed to be and I’m sorry about that.”

“Also,” she chewed on her lip before letting her voice her real thoughts usually best kept hidden, “I know you guys are spontaneous and you like to make plans out of thin air, and I know that you’re married and you guys do lots of married couple things, and you have parents and familial responsibilities, and I know how important it is for Finn to really have a family the way you do, but sometimes I just feel…” she trailed off, unsure how to express her concerns without seeming selfish or clingy—which, she supposed she might be both.

“We’re not gonna leave you behind, in fact,” his roguish grin crept onto his once somber features, “we’re having a house party this Friday at 7. We throw the party every year and get America’s finest educators absolutely wasted and it’s fantastic and you’re legally obligated to come.”

“Okay,” Rey nodded and tried for a smile which ended up feeling like an incredibly awkward facial expression instead.

Poe started to walk back down the hallway but stopped once he reached the stairs, “And Rey? You should probably be telling Finn what you were trying to say to me.”

“Yeah, probably, thanks,” she cringed and watched him walk up the stairs before setting herself back to completing the bulletin board. She finished her task with a speed that can only be found after an uncomfortable situation where the mind is doing its very best to not focus on the intricacies of said situation so as to not melt into the floor for embarrassment.

Rey stepped back and looked at her creation with a satisfied smile. All thoughts of the problematic nature of her and Poe’s forced friendship and her guilty feelings at being upset with someone she considered the most family she would ever have were pushed to the back of her mind. They weren’t gone by any means and would likely return when she would try to sleep later that night, but in the meantime, she was excited to do something for someone else. Mr. Solo’s door opened with a ringing squeak of the rusty hinges that adorned both of the unloved basement doors, and he blinked at her from his place behind his desk. If at all possible, it seemed as if the stack of papers to be graded had gotten actually taller than when she had popped in over an hour before.

“Come on then,” she ushered him with her tone to make his way into the hallway.

Likely able to read the excitement on her face, he gave a mocking sigh and visibly dragged his feet out of the classroom door, smirking as he passed by her crossed arms and fraudulent frown. His demeanor changed, however, when his eyes locked onto her paper and thumbtack creation. His smug smirk faded, and his eyes widened, and he just stood for a moment in silence. The more time that passed the more nerves fluttered in Rey’s stomach.

“Well,” she prodded, “is it good?” _Of course_ it was good, it was more than good, and logically, Rey knew she did not need some man to validate the quality of her work, but a desperate part of her very much wished for him to be impressed. Maybe it was the part of her that still wanted to prove to him—despite the straightening of the record that he did find art to be a useful school subject that was declared at the dance—that art and creativity belonged in school just as much as math or reading or political science or real actual science. Either way, she braided her fingers together behind her back as she awaited his appraisal.

A faint smile tugged at his expression and she let loose a breath as he softly replied, “It’s _really_ good.” He reached up the touch one of the drawings pinned in place, “You drew all these? And got the quotes from the students?”

Rey watched his finger trace the outline of her caricature of Abe Lincoln next to a quote from one of the APUSH students of why he was his favorite president, and smiled, “I did. They were really excited to participate. That one’s my favorite for obvious reasons.”

Ben’s eyes tracked where her finger was pointing to a caricature of Bea next to her quote and he read underneath his breath, “ _My favorite president will be myself because I will agree on all of her platforms, and I won’t be sexist_.” He smiled and stifled a chuckle, “Absolutely brilliant. You even drew them in Thomas Nast’s cartoon style.”

“Well,” she blushed, very pleased with herself that he caught that, “I am nothing if not thorough.”

“Apparently,” he looked over their shoulders and started to laugh.

“What?”

“Mine is better looking than yours now.”

She laughed and elbowed him in the ribs which only made him laugh more, “They aren’t comparable since I made them both.”

“Whatever you say,” his eyes were glinting with amusement even as their laughter petered out, and a couple seconds passed where she smiled up at him.

“Are you going to Finn and Poe’s house party this Friday?” The question came unbidden to the forefront of her brain, and it felt like a normal enough thing to talk about between coworkers that she let it slip out without hindrance.

The lighthearted atmosphere between them faded with the blank stare she was returned with. The dead air between them was a fairly good indication that she had just stuck her foot in her mouth and asked about a party that he had clearly not been or had never been invited to despite it apparently having been an annual tradition. It only then occurred to her that Ben Solo to the rest of the school was the major asshole she had known him to be little over a week ago and he was likely never invited for such a reason.

“Alright then,” Rey, red-faced, tried to transition, “what are you doing this Friday then?”

Ben shrugged with his hands in his dress slacks and rocked back onto his heels, looking very much like he was trying not to seem victimized by finding out that he was being excluded by his coworkers (to be fair, a week ago, she wouldn’t have invited him either were it her party, he _was_ a massive dick after all), “Ah, grading papers likely.”

Finn and Poe would murder her. They would murder her for bringing anger issues asshole Solo to their night of fun. Something about what the look on their faces would be when he showed up though was just too appealing to pass up. That and she couldn’t do with the awkward casualness Ben was trying to offer to not make her feel bad that meant he should absolutely be going as well.

“You should come. It starts at 7.”

He shook his head, “I know they’re your friends and just know that I say this with the utmost understanding of where they’re coming from, but they hate me.”

Rey smiled and jostled his shoulder, “Poe and I are barely friends and he barely likes me as it is. You should come anyway. You can take a break from grading papers, I can get a chance to piss him off, and you could prove to all our coworkers that you aren’t as much of a shithead as they think you are. Besides, everyone will apparently be raging drunk anyway, so they’ll forget to care.”

“A shithead? That’s new.”

“Come on! I’ll even agree to walk in at the same time as you, so it won’t be as terrible.”

“ _As terrible_? You really are a good salesperson,” the teasing nature of his voice told her he was very close to accepting if she just pressed a little bit more.

“Say you’ll be there.”

He rolled his eyes, but his expression was still fond, “Alright.”


	5. A Party and a Funky Uber Destination

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poe's house party and then a lot of things get talked about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, sorry to crawl out of the hole I've been in since July (JULY), but, um, here's a chapter that's a bit longer than the other four but? What can you do, heh

Ben is still elbow-deep (metaphorically) in ungraded papers by the time Rey rolls around at six-thirty on a Friday. He didn’t lift his eyes to meet hers until she was standing a few feet from his desk, looking almost oblivious as to why she was in his classroom at all and with her teacher bag slung over her shoulder.

“It’s almost time,” she informed him with a concealed smirk, finding their situation to-be most incredibly funny.

He grimaced, “I’ve got two more essays to grade before I’m caught up,” the way he referred to needing to be _caught up_ as if he ever did anything more than schoolwork in both his professional and private time, “do you mind waiting? Ten minutes at most, I swear.”

“It’s best to be a little bit late to one of Poe’s parties anyway, I don’t mind,” she flashed an easygoing smile and sat in a student’s desk, his eyes awkwardly trailing her as she did so before squinting back down at his red pen and an unlucky student’s paper.

Rey seized the opportunity to take in his classroom as his eyes were trained on his scribbling. Just as it had looked all the other times to her, it seemed cold and miserable. There were next to no decorations, but after getting to know him only just, she realized it was less that he himself was a boring person like his classroom, but more that he didn’t have the time to decorate. He must think she is very silly then with her bright artworks and motivational posters and art diagrams doing their absolute best to cover the hideous cinder blocks of the basement walls. There was also the matter of his bookshelf, which had also been a point of intrigue for her. Set apart from all the AMSCO books, American Pageant textbooks, and that one Howard Zinn novel was a shelf full of classic literature and not necessarily those of a strictly historical literature nature. The spines on them looked creased and worn as if well-used—not in the abused way of the weathered textbooks—but enough to make her consider that he’d personally read them more than once. She was at a loss for why a history teacher would bother keeping them in his classroom, but she supposed it was at least a point of intrigue.

While she attempted to discern which book was his favorite based on the appearance of the spine, she was just zoned out enough that when he groaned and hit his forehead against the desk, it earned a genuine jump in her seat from her. She realized it was only an act of frustration when he leaned back up and hid a small smirk from her.

“Okay,” he sighed running his hands through his hair to comb it back into place before shuffling his papers into order.

She bounced from her seat and put on as cheerful a look as she could, “Ready to go?”

“Ready to drink,” he mumbled.

“That’s the spirit!”

* * *

“ _Re-ey_ and—oh,” Poe’s smile faltered a moment as he looked up at Ben’s awkward expression, “um, hey So— _Ben_. Glad you could make it!” It took everything in Rey not to combust into a fit of laughter for the reaction Poe delivered, it was only with a vaguely mortified Ben at her side that caused her to refrain.

Behind Poe and the doorway, Rey could see Rose and Kaydel sipping beers in the living room. When Poe scurried out of their way after a beat too long, Rose’s eyes widened at the surprise guest, and Kaydel caught Rey’s eye and gave her a cryptic smile. Jannah waved at Ben, who offered a timid nod in return, from the kitchen, and Finn, who stood next to her, could not have been more obvious in his gaping. She only just caught a glimpse of what looked like Mitaka hightailing it out of sight. The mismatched trio of Rey, Ben, and Poe stood in a terrible silence in the doorway.

Rey, from personal experience, knew that it burned Poe to ever sit in silence, and she could visibly see him try to shake off the awkward tension and smooth it over, “So, uh, beers?”

They both nodded without speaking and while Poe was off to the kitchen in search of their drinks, Ben leaned down and whispered, “They look like they have no idea why I’m here.”

“What do you mean,” she asked without having the intention of receiving a real answer, “you’re here because I invited you.”

“So, they had no idea I would be here.”

“Not quite true, Kaydel knew.”

His cheeks were just slightly red, and she could sense his embarrassment and general wish to be swallowed up by the earth, so she jabbed his side with her elbow in a teasing way, “Relax, like I told you last week, soon they will be too drunk to care.”

Poe walked back to them, three beers in hand, facial features smoothed over, looking as much like the welcoming host as ever and addressed Ben directly, “I saw Snap Wexley the other day in Home Depot. You remember Snap?”

“Uh,” Ben blinked at him.

“Come on, high school, you know?” Rey made eye contact with Kaydel and begged her with her eyes to rescue them from Poe attempting to rehash his glory days in high school as small talk. She’d, frankly, completely forgotten that Ben and Poe— _and Kay_ , she added—had gone through school together and something about the thought made her wish it had stayed forgotten. Kaydel, blessed thing, mouthed for Rey to give her one moment.

“Oh, uh, yeah. I remember him,” he took more of a gulp rather than a sip of beer.

“You remember that time he did the backflip in the mascot fit at the senior year pep rally?” Poe chuckled, and Rey cringed for how forced it sounded and thanked her lucky stars that Kaydel had slipped into the group. “He was a funny guy.”

“No, I missed that pep rally. Sounded fun though.”

“Oh, where were you?” The feigned genuine interest almost made Rey snort—as if anyone remembered why they missed a high school pep rally past the age of twenty-one.

“Uh,” Ben’s face turned red for a curious moment and he rubbed the back of his neck, “I don’t know if I recall—”

Kaydel jumped in and hit him on the shoulder, “No, that was when Snap locked you in the locker room and stole your clothes!”

“Right, how could I forget,” his face was fully flushed and Kaydel was smiling, oblivious, at the rest of the small group. Rey should have asked Rose to save them from Poe instead, she could not recall another time in her life that she had ever felt such terrible secondhand embarrassment. Poe, at least, had the good nature to look ashamed. She was also _not thinking_ about how Kay came to know or see (did she rescue him?) vulnerable high school Ben Solo locked in a locker room without clothes.

He pointed between Ben and Kay in an effort to redirect the conversation, “I can’t remember, were you two friends?”

Kay responded with laughter, “No,” and Rey thought she could have died until she continued with her sentence, “I was just a freshman when you guys graduated, but we were in chess club together.”

Poe nodded the nod of a person who never played chess once in his life, “I didn’t know that there was a chess club.”

“We were competitive,” Kay glanced at Ben, “Won a couple of awards, I think.”

“Ah,” Poe nodded, thoroughly chastened.

“Anyway,” Kay brought a blessed change of subject and grabbed Poe’s sleeve, “I came over to tell you that Rose _specifically_ requested it.”

Poe whined in response, “No, we _teach_ high schoolers, we aren’t _actually_ high schoolers!”

Rey smirked and mumbled to Ben while Poe was distracted, “Says the thirty-year-old who can only connect with people by bragging about how cool he was in high school. The first time I met him, he asked me if I liked football, to which I said no, and to which he forced me to endure listening to all of his greatest high school football feats.”

Ben stifled a chuckle at that, and they tuned back into Poe and Kay’s conversation, “You promised her any game of her choice for missing homecoming.”

“Fine.”

Ben’s amusement at her anecdote faded into dread as he turned to her, “ _Game_?”

But Poe was already mobilizing everyone, “Alright, everyone in the living room!”

It was to be expected that a fairly recently married couple who also happened to work in a high school wouldn’t have a big living room, and Rey and her fellow coworkers rushed to find a decent seating arrangement. Except for Ben, of course, who seemed desperate to not sit next to Mitaka on the couch, who looked as if he would rather leave altogether than sit next to Ben Solo. Kaydel scooted closer to Mitaka and offered her spot to Ben, and he gratefully but clumsily was forced to squeeze between Rose and Kay, Rey sitting on the floor against Rose’s knees.

The rules of the game were laid out and people made noise about having “no targeting” rules, but Rey had played this before (as did anyone who went to high school as well as anyone who had the misfortune of having a secret party in a college dorm) and there would absolutely be targeting. She was, as she often found herself to be, absolutely right.

Several rounds in and with many people still having fingers up, Finn was looking at Poe with a devilish grin, “Never have I ever had a sex dream about Hux.”

Between Poe’s loud exclamations of it being an unfair and targeted move on his husband’s part, there was nobody to see Ben silently take a swig of his beer—except for Kaydel, who screamed. Rey turned to look up at him in astonishment and she giggled at his embarrassed expression and blushing cheeks.

“It was just one time,” he mumbled.

Rose grabbed his elbow, “Do you _like_ him?”

It was truly amazing how Rose went from awkwardly shoving fairy lights for him to hang up a week ago to grabbing his arm and trying to get him to spill his romantic secrets to her as if she’d known him forever. That was just how Rose was, Rey’s brain supplied, and she thought back to meeting her for the first time that short month and a half ago and how Rey really could trick herself into thinking there was never a time that Rey and Rose weren’t friends.

Instantly Ben’s face recoiled, and Rey laughed some more, “God, no, he’s a pretentious prick—”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Poe mutter something to Finn with an eye roll and Finn chortled. She imagined it was something along the lines of ‘you’re one to talk,’ which, kind of fair.

“—but he does have a very efficient color-coded lesson plan system.”

Finn was making a semi-condescending face, but Rey could tell he was starting to warm up to Ben under this newly uncovered information about him, “And that…does it for you?”

Jannah cut in, “No listen, I’ve seen that—it’s surprisingly sexy, it has to be said. No shame in admitting, it,” and she tipped her glass towards Ben with mock respect.

Several rounds later, and with everyone a bit drunker and loose-lipped than they had already been before, Kaydel was slouched into the couch, beer sort of balancing on her stomach, and her words were starting to slur, “I’ve got nothing—I don’t know—never have I ever had sex at school?” She sat up and looked straight at Poe, who was starting to raise his glass to his lips, “ _As a teacher_ , we all know you fucked around in high school, Dameron.”

The only two bottles to raise were, shockingly, Jannah and Rose. Jannah was smirking into the bottle, and Rose had to stop drinking before she giggled her beer all over herself. Kay’s eyes widened with such intensity Rey thought they would pop from her head, which really would have been a party bummer. Rey lolled her head onto Rose’s lap and looked up at her with incredulity in her own eyes.

“ _When_?”

Rose leaned over to whisper in her ear conspiratorially, “After homecoming, her car needed a jump start.”

“You’re kidding.”

A sudden jolt to the couch sent Rey careening forward just in time for Kay to launch herself across Ben’s lap to join the secret conversation, and she performed the best whisper she could manage in her increasingly drunken state (which was as loud as a normal speaking voice), “I want to hear too!”

Rey laughed as Rose filled her in by whispering in her ear, equally loudly, but what she found more comical was the look on Ben’s face. His back was pushed into the couch and his beer was held safely above Kay’s head to keep her from creating an accident. They made eye contact, and he managed a bit of a smile. She couldn’t know for sure if he was having a good time without asking him, and she wasn’t about to ask, but she was pretty sure he seemed more at ease—even with his former-fellow-chess-club-mate far too much in his personal space.

Eventually, as people were beginning to get actually well and truly intoxicated, the game naturally died down, having fulfilled its purpose. People started to break off into groups, and Poe turned the music up louder—as he was known to do. Finn and Poe were attempting to teach Mitaka, who looked like he would rather curl up and die, how to dance in the middle of the living room. Jannah pulled Rose off the couch in an invitation to dance, which was met with raucous cheering on Rey and Kaydel’s parts.

“You two are the most sober people here,” Kaydel addressed Rey and Ben.

“I’m not sober,” Rey exclaimed, feeling as if she were being called out for doing something wrong.

“That’s not what I said. Kitchen, now.”

She felt she had little to do but offer an apologetic shrug to Ben and head to the kitchen as she was commanded. The three of them gathered around the counter while Kaydel started to pour shots of whiskey.

“I don’t think it’s such a great idea to mix beer and liquor—” Ben started but cut himself off as Rey shot hers down her throat. She smirked at him in challenge.

“Fine,” he took his shot and immediately made a face, “God that fucking burns.”

“Do you not drink very often?”

“I don’t do _those_ very often,” he said with a marked distaste.

Kay gasped from beside Rey, “Are you a cocktail person?” He flushed a bit and nodded to her delight. “I _never_ would have expected _you_ of all people.”

“Shots taste like ass, why would I do that to myself when I could have what is basically juice instead?”

Rey made a scandalized expression, which seemed to embolden him to lean forward with a teasing expression, “And you want to know something else?”

Rey and Kaydel spoke in tandem, “What?”

“I hate the taste of beer. It tastes like piss, and I think everyone is pretending they like it because everyone needs a reason to be pretentious about something.”

He looked like he was very proud of himself, so Kaydel forced another shot of whiskey into his hands, “Here, more whiskey—as punishment.”

The two women laughed at his scrunched features and the small cough he gave after he forced the liquor down his throat. Ben seemed to be a good sport about it and laughed at himself along with them. Not that he was normally not a good sport—which Rey couldn’t say for sure because she hadn’t known him long—but his distinct easiness in socializing with Kay let her know the whiskey was doing its job.

“Okay, I have to ask: what about wine?” Kaydel put both of her hands on his shoulders, and intense expression on her face as she gripped him, making it seem that she was interrogating him for the most heinous of crimes.

“Red,” he responded, they nodded, and then he smiled, “but sweet.”

Rey crinkled her nose in distaste, being a dry white wine person herself.

He continued, “The less my mouth feels like sandpaper when I’m drinking it, the better.”

“Fair enough,” Kay nodded.

“Alright, this will be the final straw,” Rey teased, “hard seltzer: yea or nay?”

Smirking, he leaned over her, close enough that theirs noses were almost touching, and she could smell the whiskey on his breath, “It’s _only_ 100 calories.”

Rey couldn’t withhold her giggles at how ridiculous his behavior was and had to lean her head against his shoulder when she almost lost her balance. His shoulders were also shaking with laughter and she could hear Kaydel’s delight off to the side as well. When Ben started to sway, they settled back down against the counter in a line, Rey in the middle, and looked over at the scene in the living room.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Absolutely not,” Kay responded, and Rey laughed and nudged him in the ribs to continue.

“Why does Dopheld look like he’s going to piss himself every time I look at him?”

Kay reached across Rey and put a hand on his shoulder (which put her elbow delightfully right in Rey’s nose), “Well, for starters, nobody calls him Dopheld, for obvious reasons—”

Pushing her elbow from her face, Rey finished for her, “And two, it’s because you’re a bit of a prick.”

Kay shrugged, “Sorry, man.”

“No, that’s fair.”

Kay nodded, “Maybe work on that, and for the record, I don’t personally subscribe to the belief that you’re that scary.”

Ben gave her a timid smile and a nod. Something about it all made Rey feel accomplished. If it weren’t for her, nobody would know that Ben Solo—grumpy asshole Solo—can’t shoot whiskey. Credit where credit was due, he also could have shown up to the party with a terrible attitude and made everyone hate him more, but he didn’t and that felt like something to Rey.

Three hours later and sloshed was the only way to describe how Rey felt. The party had winded down and people were deciding whether or not to drive (if able to safely, of course), call an Uber, or take advantage of their hosts’ drunkenness and crash on the various available surfaces they could find. It was all very mature and very befitting of America’s educators. Jannah wasn’t a keen drinker and had only had the one beer hours ago and was driving herself and Rose home. Mitaka was sneakily laying claim to the couch by refusing to get up. Rey, Ben, and Kaydel were sat in a row on Finn and Poe’s stoop. The cold air was good for her, Rey thought, but it didn’t clear her foggy brain very much.

Ben had maybe been too indulgent with the shots that Kaydel had kept plying him with. In her defense, the face he made every time without fail was priceless and it was maybe the only time he would be agreeable with being laughed at, being somewhat of a proud person. Kaydel was nose deep in her phone trying to focus hard enough to get an Uber, while Rey and Ben were noses deep in her phone trying to focus hard enough on downloading and understanding how Uber worked.

Rey wasn’t exactly a party girl in college and also just had a certain individualistic mindset about her that would have rather walked two miles home rather than depending on a stranger to take her there. Finn usually just called her a stubborn orphan, which he was only allowed to say because he was also an orphan. Her first attempt trying to understand the app was while she was wasted. Kaydel tried to explain it to her but Kay was also wasted. Ben was older and more unsociable than her, so he knew even less how to work the app, and he was honestly probably more wasted than her or Kaydel anyway.

“So, you live two streets away,” Ben blinked forcefully like he was trying to manually start his brain, “from me.”

“Does that mean we should ride to one of our houses?” Rey really didn’t understand the blurry words on her phone.

“No,” Ben’s brow was furrowed, “that would be innap—” he blinked again as his mouth failed to form the several syllable word, “innaprop—you know?” He finished somewhat helplessly.

“Why don’t you have the driver drop one of you off at your house and then drive the other to the other house,” Kay said like it was simple and easy, which, as Rey squinted at her swirling screen, it was not. They ignored her.

“So, my car is here,” Rey pointed at the offending vehicle which she would die in if she attempted to operate it now, “and your car is at the school.” _Why, oh why, didn’t they plan this out ahead of time._

“Wouldn’t it be funny if you two went to the school,” Kay was lazily laughing into her phone, reminding Rey that she was, indeed, off her rocker.

So, naturally, they ended up at the school. Rey wasn’t really sure how that happened or why it had seemed like a good idea, but they rode from the party together and got dropped off by Ben’s car—which neither of them could drive—with a suspicious look from their driver in the parking lot of their professional workplace. It sort of felt like she remembered laughing at Kay’s joke and then blinked and ended up there. Ben seemed similarly confused and maybe even a little panicked.

He pulled his keys out of his pocket and unlocked his car. Rey’s eyes bulged and she felt like she was moving through water when she grabbed him by the elbow to stop him from walking towards the driver’s side door.

“You can’t!” She cried, and he looked down at her, confused.

“I’m not driving?” He responded with a questioning tone, but the question was more of asking why she thought he would be dumb enough to drive plastered.

“Oh,” Rey blinked up at him, thumb absently feeling along the seam of his coat sleeve—it was a nice texture for her drunken fingers, in her defense, “then?”

“I was going to sit. You can also?” He seemed bashful then and looked at his toes while sticking his hands in his coat pockets.

“O-oh sure, makes sense, yes,” Rey was overly aware of how much she was nodding, sobering up far faster than she needed to be. All things considered.

Ben’s car was sort of a rust bucket, which Rey knew because she knew cars. Her unpaid labor for her foster father’s chop shop (long before she was placed into the care of Maz) had made sure of that. She had lots of useless knowledge about cars—useless because she had no intention of ever being a mechanic, though she supposed it came in handy when the mechanics looking at her car tried to dupe her, a silly woman, into paying more for something she could do herself. All thoughts of hungry nights and the smell of oil and grease always on her fingers aside, Ben’s car was also cool. Like, beneath the sort of messy and unprofessional layer of normal paint she could tell it used to have a unique paint job, kind of cool. Her intoxicated brain supplied an image of grumpy-always-wears-a-tie Ben Solo pulling up to work in a car with flames on the side and she giggled as she got in.

“What?” Ben said, eyes wide, as he looked around the interior of the car (perfectly neat and spotless on the inside, which is more of what she expected of him) for something she could have been making fun of him for.

“Nothing,” then she changed her mind, “a 1953 Falcon? Not what I expected.”

She could tell even with the lone streetlight across the road that his cheeks were red, “It’s my dad’s. It’s a bucket of bolts.”

“No,” Rey protested, smoothing a hand along the vintage dashboard almost like she was petting it, “it’s classic.”

“Hmm,” he just hummed and thrummed his fingers nervously on the steering wheel.

Rey’s drunken brain was screaming things to ask him about that simply were not appropriate. The loudest being, “you have a dad?” So, she kept quiet and tried to think of something that wouldn’t be awkward and offensive and sad.

Instead, she stuck her entire foot in her mouth and awkwardly stuttered out, “So, you have family?”

“Um,” he tipped his head back against the headrest, and she noticed his fingers were tapping a bit more than before, “kind of. Not really, but also, technically, yes. You?”

Rey’s smile was a bit wan, “Kind of, not really, but also technically yes.”

“I haven’t talked to my family in a couple years. Well, I saw them a year ago, but I didn’t really have anything to say,” he was blushing, and the words were falling from his mouth, it seemed, faster than his brain could tell him to stop saying them, and Rey knew what that felt like.

“Sounds complicated.”

He snorted and smiled a bit, but it seemed a bit sad, “You could say.”

An awkward silence settled in, and Rey didn’t really mean to start talking about her complicated version of family, but she felt odd knowing about him but him not knowing about her, which made her sigh and blurt, “I get it. I’m an orphan.”

He looked at her wide-eyed, the whites of his eyes glinting in the sliver of streetlight, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t offer her pity or some misplaced apology, and her skin buzzed—maybe from the alcohol, but maybe from the sudden kinship she felt. It was ridiculous, she thought, that they’d started the night as coworkers warming up to one another at their coworkers’ house party and ended up in a suburban school parking lot at 2 a.m. talking about their complicated family lives. Ridiculous.

“Well,” she chuckled sourly, “I guess you could say I _was_ an orphan since nobody really looks at a whole adult and thinks orphan. So, one might say, instead, I grew up in the foster system and it wasn’t great, but now I have a foster mom who I still keep in touch with and who adopted me and helped me go to college.” When she chanced a look at him, he was still staying quiet and just listening to her. “One also might say I have a former foster brother, who helped get me a job at a high school.”

He did speak then, but only to ask, “Finn?”

“Yeah,” she smiled and nodded, “Which means I also have a new sort-of-but-not-quite brother-in-law, who is, as you maybe definitely already know, kind of an attention whore.”

A small laugh was startled out of him at that, “That, I’m well acquainted with.”

“Do tell me what Poe was like in high school—not the superstar version he always brags about, you know,” Rey’s smile was greedy, and she leaned in towards him slightly, “the real version.”

Ben hummed for a moment and leaned his head against the glass of his window, “Poe was my best friend until 9th grade, which you probably would not have guessed and maybe wouldn’t even believe unless you were to, for whatever reason,” he scrunched his nose a bit, “be in my parents’ house and see the pictures of us that my mom probably to this day still has up, even though I told her to take them down when he ended up to be a little shit in high school.”

“No fucking way,” and really— _no fucking way_ —no fucking way was football star Poe Dameron formerly best friends with awkward chess club Ben Solo. The math did not add up.

“Yes,” Ben nodded solemnly, which was a funny look for him since Rey knew that he was still majorly intoxicated, “it’s true.”

“What happened in 9th grade?”

She could see him chewing on the inside of his cheek, and his finger started tapping the steering wheel again, and she hurried to correct herself, “I mean, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

He shrugged, “I guess I’ve just never told anyone before, but,” he shrugged again, and she could hear what he would have said clear as a sunny day, _but I’m drunk and you’re drunk and we’re stranded in a school parking lot, so who cares_ , “we came out to each other in 8th grade. I’m,” he paused and seemed to test the words in his mouth like it really had been since the 90s that he’d said them, “bi, I guess, hypothetically, if I were to ever stop working overtime so much and bother dating anyone.” His fingers were nervously tapping the steering wheel, and Rey grabbed the hand nearest to her, she could blame it on the alcohol if she needed to, and he didn’t really reciprocate, but he didn’t pull away either. “Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when he came back from a summer-long Christian camp, pretended I didn’t exist, joined the football team, and started sleeping his way through the cheerleading squad.”

“That’s shitty,” and it was, it was really shitty, and it wasn’t her place to throw Poe’s old friendship drama in his face, but she wishes she could.

Ben shrugged again, “It was the 90s, I shouldn’t have had my hopes up that anyone would be anything more than shitty. Besides, I’m sure it made him a lot more miserable than it did me.”

Rey nodded, “That’s probably true.”

“I’m glad he got it figured out though—in the end—he and Finn seem happy.”

“They are,” and she couldn’t help it if her voice was just a little bitter, “sickeningly domestic and happy.”

He was looking at her again in that quiet way that was something of an acknowledgment that he knew there was more she wanted or could say, and he would listen to her if she wanted him to. She sighed.

“I don’t,” she sighed again, “I don’t dislike Poe. Our personalities don’t really mix that well, but I don’t _not_ like him.”

“But?”

“ _But_ ,” damn him being able to pull the words she’d been bottling up for a year out of her, “Poe has a family. Poe has everything Finn and I never had growing up, and I’m so happy for him, that he finally gets to have this, you know?” He nodded at her when she paused. “But Finn and I always do Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the holidays together because Finn is _my_ family. Now, they’re married, and Poe’s family is Finn’s family and they’re doing their own holidays together as _the Damerons_ ,” she rolled her eyes, “and my foster mom owns a diner that she keeps open on holidays, so I’m just going to be alone like before I ever met Finn.”

His hand was holding hers back, she noticed late, and he simply repeated the words she’d said for him, “That’s shitty.”

She smiled, and maybe it was the alcohol loosening her tongue, but she asked, “Do you do holidays with anyone? Since you don’t do them with your family, I mean I assume.”

“No,” he shrugged, he was doing a lot of shrugging tonight, “my plans for Thanksgiving usually include making dinner for one and turning on the parade and drinking too much mulled wine so I fall asleep faster,” he blushes like he hadn’t really meant to say that last part, but then he continues on as if to say _might as well,_ “I think it’s hard to stay sober over the holidays. It’s been so long since I talked to them, so I don’t know if they miss me or not, and I don’t know if I even want to know either way.”

Yeah, the alcohol was definitely loosening her tongue, “What if _we_ did Thanksgiving together?”

He was laughing softly, and yeah, she hadn’t known him that long and they’d disliked each other for most of that short time, so it shouldn’t have been a revelation that she’d never seen him laugh or smile this much, but it was.

“What if we did,” his eyes were slipping closed, and Rey could feel the energy in the car was soupy and sleepy, and she let her head rest against the seat. It shouldn’t have been comfortable, but the world was swirling when she let her eyes close and the world swirled her right into sleep.

* * *

Rey woke up first. It couldn’t have been later than 8 in the morning, and she could hear birds chirping in the tree Ben had parked beside. Her head pounded something ferocious and she had to blink her way into her eyes being able to tolerate the morning sunshine that was beaming directly into the windshield. Ben had reclined his seat at some point and his head was turned to the side and towards her, he was slumping a little bit. He looked— _no, absolutely not._

If she snuck a secret picture of him and changed the contact in her phone of him to that, well, that’s neither here nor there.

She poked him in the shoulder where his button up was rumpled and would definitely need to be ironed. His eyes fluttered underneath his eyelids before blinking open. He seemed to immediately regret opening his eyes, which she could sympathize with.

“Shit,” he winced, holding one eye open as he sat up and fumbled in the center console.

He slipped on sunglasses and ran a hand through his messy hair, and he looked— _no, no, no._ Regardless of how much she protested it, her mind kept coming up with stupid thoughts about his hair in the sunlight and how he looked in sunglasses and how he looked a little miserable but in a sort of good way. For some reason as he grumbled to himself as he squinted through the windshield, she took in all the sharp angles of his face nearly glowing in the sun, and she really wanted to…draw him?

_I’m an artist, he has an interesting face, that’s not weird unless you make it weird._ She swallowed whatever other thoughts she could be thinking and locked them away to, hopefully, never ever be examined later.

She cleared her throat, “Consider this: we pick up coffee—my treat—and you drop me off at my car at Finn and Poe’s.”

“Yes,” he cleared his throat too and turned his key into the ignition, “coffee. Absolutely.”

The ride to the nearest Starbucks is tense and silent. Rey is left alone with her thoughts in the silence, which is not helpful for making said thoughts go away, while she can almost physically feel Ben’s discomfort radiating off of him. She really wished she knew what he was thinking, but she was fairly certain it probably went along the lines of: _oh, my fucking God, did we actually just sleep in the school parking lot after showing up drunk at 2 in the morning?_ She could relate, but honestly, she’d sort of come to terms with it already as it was happening.

When they pulled into the drive-thru, she smirked and tried to cut the tension, “I bet your coffee preferences are as sugary as your alcohol preferences.”

That seemed to do the trick, and he smirked back in challenge, “You think so?”

They pulled up to the speaker, and Rey nodded, “I’ll have a dark roast, just cream. Grande.”

He repeated her order to the speaker and smiled at her as he spoke, making it look like he was telling Rey his order rather than the Starbucks workers, “and I’ll have a grande pumpkin spice latte. Iced.”

Rey clutched her metaphorical pearls and gasped with the most melodrama she could muster with a hangover, “An iced latte on a whopping 40-degree morning? How bisexual of you.”

His face was burning (and his mouth was turned up a bit at the corners, so she was glad she hadn’t offended him) when she handed him her debit card to pass to the checkout window, and he didn’t say anything in response until he was handing her coffee to her, “I hope you burn your tongue on your boring, bitter, hot coffee.”

She grinned, “Back to that, are we?”

“You started it,” he sipped from his straw, a small smile curled around it.

She had to remind him how to get back to Finn and Poe’s house and he laughed at her when she did, actually, burn her tongue on her hot coffee, and all-in-all it wasn’t an unpleasant drive. Not sure what to say, she hopped out when he parked behind her car on the side of the road. With a timid wave, she shut the door and had almost walked away when she heard the window being rolled down.

He was awkwardly leaned into the passenger seat, and she hated that he was so tall that he almost could get his head out of the window (except that she didn’t hate it), “Hey.”

She laughed, “Yeah?”

“Is it weird?” He chewed on his lip for a minute, and this, she thinks, this is what he was thinking when they first woke up. “That we…did that?”

“Probably, yes, but not in the way you’re thinking,” Rey nodded, despite not really knowing for sure what way he had been thinking—just an educated guess. “Besides, we’re doing Thanksgiving together—apparently—so it can’t be that weird.”

“I forgot about…that,” and Rey could feel her cheeks warming and she almost made to interrupt him and take it back and act like she’d just been joking, but he stopped her before she could. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be,” he paused, and he was also blushing and shrugging, “inappropriate? Somehow?”

_That’s not an: Ew, Rey, I was just kidding last night, I didn’t think you were actually serious,_ she blinked and thought. He was waiting for a response. Genuinely. Oh. _Oh._

She played her tone off as casual as possible, “As of last night, I’m pretty sure half the staff are literally fucking, so no. I don’t think so.”

“Okay then,” he chuckled, and she smiled in response, feeling oddly light, as he rolled his window back up and drove away.

She watched his car roll out of sight and sort of forgot she was just standing in her brother’s yard until she heard the front door open. When she turned to look, it was Finn, barefoot and haggard, coming out to meet her and it almost seemed that Poe’s face was in the window—very, very briefly.

“Was that Solo?”

“Yes,” she nodded, feeling a little awkward and almost caught if she were being honest, though caught doing what she wasn’t sure. She did not offer any nuance to his question.

“I was,” Finn pretended to be occupied with his feet, digging his toes into the damp grass, “pretty surprised when he showed up last night to be honest.”

His eyes flickered up to hers, but all she did was nod and say, “Me too.”

“You brought him though.”

“Yeah,” she smiled, “but he could have said no.”

“So, are you _friends_ now, or?” It was eating at him, she knew, how much he wanted to ask her, but he wouldn’t because he didn’t want to offend her because that’s just how Finn is. Finn doesn’t like to pry, but Finn is ungodly nosy. The ‘or’ lingered between them, and Rey did her best not to blush.

“Friends,” she forced another smile.

“Oookay,” he blew out a breath and nodded and she could read on his familiar face so plainly that he was skeptical, “Do you want to come in? For a bit? Honestly, I thought you were going to stay over last night. I was going to call you and ask where you were, but…” he trailed off.

“But?”

“But,” he laughed a little bit to himself, “Poe started throwing up and singing in Spanish into the toilet bowl.”

Rey tried to laugh, she really did. It was a funny story. She didn’t though, not really, because maybe it was just the mere mention of Poe or maybe it was her conversation she had at 2 a.m. with Ben, but the thought of Poe made her feel a little bit ill. Maybe it was just the hangover, on second thought.

“That’s funny,” she offered with a bland smile.

“Yeah,” his small laughter was definitely forced at that point and Rey really wanted to die or throw up, “anyway, did you?”

Her brow furrowed, “Did _I_ throw up and sing Spanish into a toilet bowl?”

“No, did you want to come inside?”

It was definitely just the hangover, definitely not the mention of Poe that had her feeling a little nasty, and a little like she wanted to throw Finn for a loop, “Actually, I just woke up in a car, so I think I’ll just go sleep in an actual bed.”

Finn’s eyes bulged out of his head, as she knew they would, but she was already scrambling into her car and setting the coffee into a cupholder.

“What—”

“Bye, Finn, love you, Finn!” She called out of her window as she pulled away and waved. She felt a little guilty as she looked in her mirror and saw him standing barefoot in his yard looking very confused. However, she smiled into her sip of coffee, _he can stew on that until Monday._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That was kinda definitely dialogue heavy sorry :/ Also, author does not know how Uber works, if that much was obvious


End file.
